The State of Windows 8

But first, a bit of background to the size and quality of our userbase. I warn you this is going to sound defensive, but it's important to establish that we're not a bunch of kids who sampled 50 Win8 VMs. So - Soluto's agent has been downloaded on over 3M machines in over 150 countries. We had one of the first applications running on the developer preview of Windows 8 over a year ago, and our first metro app was in the first batch released to the public in February together with the launch of the first consumer preview. We are a 2012 Microsoft Partners of the Year (in the startups category), we share investors with the likes of Skype, Dropbox & LinkedIn and most importantly - we're building a service that helps techie folks to provide tech support for their friends and family remotely without the need for remote desktop (free for supporting up to 5 PCs). Our hundreds of servers now deal with over 50 million data points every day, and we're big data junkies. Use Google to verify all that :)

And now a couple of points I hope will answer some of the questions-

1. The data used for the Windows 8 part is only based on RTM versions and later, i.e. it does not include developer preview or consumer preview.

2. Our users are outright techies, but on the other hand the machines we manage are a mix, since our users support their friends, parents and grandmas, leading to some really non-techie level usage types (IE6, 5 toolbars, etc). That being said, Windows 8 is more prominent on the supporter side in our userbase (i.e. we see more techies using it then non-techies).

3. The sample size for Windows 8 is still way smaller than that of Windows 7, naturally. But that page is automatically updating, so check it out once in a while, and with time the data will become more accurate, as big numbers tend to become. We still think it's valuable that way, even if not everything is perfectly significant. iTunes crashes more and Google Drive crashes less, that probably won't change without an update from these vendors.

4. To those who say there are no BSODs in the world since Win7 - I'm sorry but you are just plain wrong. I see the data on a daily basis. The situation is much better then XP and Vista, but part of the population still suffers from BSODs, mostly because of 3rd party drivers. I personally had a BSOD on W8 (the sad smiley modern BSOD, but still a BSOD).

5. I'm not the OP of this post and I don't know vinothshankaran.

6. As our page gets refreshed with data, we'll also be adding more components and clarifications.

If there's anything specific you'd like to see added to the page, by all means please share it here. As the lead product manager at Soluto and a long time HN enthusiast, crowdsourcing our requirements to this community sounds like a dream :)

And if you have specific questions or comments do feel free to contact me at roee@soluto.com

One last point- if you're the kind of person who receives phone calls for PC tech support from your friends and family members - give Soluto a try :)

Roee

Does the operating system do nothing else while this is happening? Does the person using the workstation just sit there and watch it run or is he/she, perhaps, doing other work and running other applications?

While running an FEA tool is not THE test, it is one data point, good or bad. I can't remember the last time on of the Vista 64 machines crashed in the last, I don't know, four years or so.