Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The State of Windows 8

soluto.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 85 posts

Re: The State of Windows 8

#71

Post by nivla »

nnq wrote: post #32

...uhm, is it just me or is this just a very successful way for them to promote their products via publishing more or less relevant statistics to have something under a link bait title? (dunno how much traffic this brought to their product site but I think this little scheme really worked for them :) )

Given that a good majority of the posts by startups here on Hacker News is aimed at attracting new customers, I see nothing wrong with this one. They analyzed their data and talked out the results. At no point did I feel pressured to learn more about their product, although out of curiosity I did checkout their main page.

Re: The State of Windows 8

#72

Post by georgemcbay »

jongalloway2 wrote: post #26
account_taken wrote: post #13

I find it really hard to believe average crashes is 7.1/month on Windows 7. I run Windows 24/7. It's never crashed. I have an overclocked 4.5Ghz i5 and have many VMware sessions running. Maybe it's because I have quality hardware? Same experience with OS X. Both are rock solid.

They list which apps crash most - stuff like Google Drive, Adobe Creative Suite, iTunes. The only common one listed is Explorer in Windows 8, which could be due to a storage driver or something. So if you're not running the software they're listing, less likely that you'll see crashiness. I agree, I pretty much never see app crashes and haven't seen a BSOD since like Vista betas.

I've been happily using Windows 8 since the RTM months prior to the retail release and I mostly like it, but I've experienced a lot of Explorer crashes. These aren't a huge deal because the OS detects the crash and restarts another explorer automatically within seconds, but it is a bit annoying that it happens so often.

I haven't really looked into the issue much because it isn't a showstopper but I suspect the problem has to do with thumbnail generation because I mostly see it when navigating folders full of video clips used for video editing. It is possible/probable that explorer itself isn't what is crashing but rather some dependent codec used for the thumbnailing is crashing, but it would be nice if explorer isolated itself better from such crashes.

Re: The State of Windows 8

#73

Post by natep »

AdamTReineke wrote: post #9
blisse wrote: post #5

I'm confused, why is this relevant? Where did they get this data? How do they get this data? How many people are they tracking? Who is Soluto? Their site doesn't make it clear at all. And I'm not going to watch a video to figure it out. And clearly the only people using Soluto would be more tech-savvy users? Prove to me that this sample is representative of the entire population?

Scroll down on the home page. Talk about hidden below the fold... // Edit: I wish they had more info. This looks like it could be REALLY slick for monitoring family computers health VS my current solution with LogMeIn.

For the things it can do, yes, it is very good. It's not a general-purpose login, so of course there will be things you can't do (like uninstall things). But the things you can do cover most things:

* Install/update programs via Ninite * Install Windows updates * Any screenshot they take with Soluto (F8) get automatically sent to you with system runtime information * Enable/disable/delay programs during startup (delaying them means Soluto starts them after you have a usable system) * Enable/disable web browser extensions * View hardware and driver information

Re: The State of Windows 8

#74

Post by Tipzntrix »

SquareWheel wrote: post #23
notatoad wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sample size is users of soluto, which appears to be a tool that analyzes your computer and makes automated 'tweaks' to make it faster and better. If it's like any similar program, that would explain the crashes.

Unless they offer more features than they used to, Soluto just watches your startup programs to determine which ones are slowing you down. They basically make recommendations on which programs to remove from startup. Not a bad service overall.

Personally, I have used Soluto to see what's going on during startup, and then removed it after. They do provide certain services like the ability to move programs to and from your startup more easily than through Windows Explorer if you keep it installed though.

Re: The State of Windows 8

#75

Post by roee »

Ergomane wrote: post #62
roee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, Roee from Soluto here. When you deal with big numbers you see lots of BSODs, both in W7 and W8. The people surrounding you may be taking better care of their machines then the average. I personally encountered one BSOD on my shiny W8 machine.

What is the distribution of BSODs? Are they evenly spread over the population or are some users/machines responsible for the majority of cases?

We will improve the visibility of this, thanks.

Re: The State of Windows 8

#76

Post by klibertp »

gokhan wrote: post #21

There are hundreds of windows 7 & 8 users around me, including myself. Haven't seen a bluescreen for a long long time.

This is anecdote, but my Win8 crashed just this morning, when I unplugged my mouse from one and plugged it back into another USB port. It dumped memory to disk (with nice progress indicator :)), restarted and booted perfectly ok, just asked me if I want to send the data about the crash to Microsoft. It never happened before and I don't suspect it will happen again this or next year, either, but - it sure happens :)

As a similar anecdote, two days ago my Xorg server crashed. Not WM (E17) mind you, but X server. It was running continuously for about two months, was eating more and more RAM and finally, when Chromium froze and went on a RAM eating frenzy, the server crashed. It was the first time I saw X server crashing since I fought with enabling compositing in XFree on PIII 1Ghz, but still, it happened.

So, what I want to say is that no software can run flawlessly forever; it's just a question about how often (or how rarely) the crash (or other malfunction) is going to happen. 0.28 bluescreens per month per user is a pretty impressive feat and it's says more about how good than how bad W8 is.

Re: The State of Windows 8

#77

Post by JimmaDaRustla »

ygra wrote: post #57
JimmaDaRustla wrote: post #56

No offence, but understanding the effect of Windows 8 based on a tool that speeds up boot times...is moronic considering Win8 has some of the fastest PC boot times I've ever seen on the PC market. Edit: I know, it does more than that, but I've always known Soluto from when it was a startup analyzer.

Since you do know it does more than that (including monitoring system health and crashing applications – which it did for a long time, too) why do you still consider it moronic?

Just saying, a fresh install is a "healthy" install. I don't know anyone who gets a new PC and says "Boy, you know what this brand new machine needs? Some system maintenance software."

Re: The State of Windows 8

#78

Post by rogerbinns »

roee wrote: post #53

Hi all, Roee from Soluto here (providers of the W8 data). I'll try to respond to the questions and comments here. 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…

> 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

What is the thinking behind that? The appeal of remote desktops is that "show me" is orders of magnitude more efficient than "tell me". I would take the remote desktop every time.

The usual problem with remote desktops is they are a pain to setup. This is somewhat alleviated by Skype doing screen sharing, but sadly doesn't allow remote interaction.

Chrome's remote desktop has worked really for me, and does allow remote interaction. It does require Chrome to be installed on the supportee's system and one extension installed, but I haven't found that to be a problem. https://chrome.google.com/remotedesktop for anyone who is interested.

So do you have something in mind that is even more efficient than "show me" and remote desktops?

Re: The State of Windows 8

#79

Post by ygra »

JimmaDaRustla wrote: post #77
ygra wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you do know it does more than that (including monitoring system health and crashing applications – which it did for a long time, too) why do you still consider it moronic?

Just saying, a fresh install is a "healthy" install. I don't know anyone who gets a new PC and says "Boy, you know what this brand new machine needs? Some system maintenance software."

You never bought a computer with Windows already installed, did you? :)

Re: The State of Windows 8

#80

Post by iso-8859-1 »

jongalloway2 wrote: post #26
account_taken wrote: post #13

I find it really hard to believe average crashes is 7.1/month on Windows 7. I run Windows 24/7. It's never crashed. I have an overclocked 4.5Ghz i5 and have many VMware sessions running. Maybe it's because I have quality hardware? Same experience with OS X. Both are rock solid.

They list which apps crash most - stuff like Google Drive, Adobe Creative Suite, iTunes. The only common one listed is Explorer in Windows 8, which could be due to a storage driver or something. So if you're not running the software they're listing, less likely that you'll see crashiness. I agree, I pretty much never see app crashes and haven't seen a BSOD since like Vista betas.

Windows Explorer is an userspace app, a driver would not force it to crash any more than it would force any other application using I/O to crash.
Post reply on HN