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Freeware Files: Five Apps for Diagnosing PC Problems!

David Murphy — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:30:00 -0500

Brrzap! Not all hardware failures start that way, but there's a good chance they'll end up sounding like that as a result of you chucking an unruly piece of hardware through the nearest exit of your dwelling. Before you hulk up next time, know that there are ways to get a little bit more information about the status of your components. Applications that assess the health of your system's various parts serve a twofold purpose. You can deduce that equipment on your system might be going kaput or is otherwise screwed up in some fashion. Armed with that knowledge, you can then attempt to make an effective repair. If there is no way to repair your parts, you'll at least get an advanced notice that disaster is about to strike and that a trip to the electronics store might be in your soon-to-immediate future.

In this week's freeware roundup, I'm going to give you a list of applications that will help you assess your system's CPU, hard drives, optical drives, network connections, and memory. Don't delay in installing these applications--every second wasted puts you but one step closer to a catastrophic meltdown--or, at the very least, an unexpected failure in a critical piece of your PC. And nobody wants to be left hanging one the one day you really, really, really need to access the Internet, for example.

Core Temp

What it does: As the name suggests, Core Temp is a quick and easy way to check out the temperature of your CPU as determined by the processor's internal probes. If you're a familiar face at Maximum PC, you've surely heard the gang wax about the wonders of the SpeedFan utility. Temperature-wise, the two programs conduct similar readings. The reason I lean to Core Temp, however, is that SpeedFan will sometimes offset the actual temperate of your CPU (depending on the processor) by a hearty 15 degrees. Core Temp gets the reading right the first time, every time--a perfect tool for novice users that don't know about SpeedFan's important little quirk.

Download it here!

NetStress

What it does: Although you can use innumerable online tools to give you a decent gauge of your current bandwidth, NetStress is an offline tool that will help you isolate network peculiarities within your internal setup. To gain the most use out of the program, set up your network and run the throughput benchmarking features at a time when you feel your setup is at peak efficiency. Record the numbers. Later, if you start to detect slowdowns or other strange goings-on, re-run the benchmarking application and see how your numbers stack up. Just like Sherlock Holmes, you can begin to isolate the problem to an errant network cable, problematic PC, or router based on the results of your tests!

Download it here!

Nero DiscSpeed

What it does: Curious to know if you're getting maximum performance out of your optical drive? That's where Nero DiscSpeed comes into the picture. Although this program is no longer being updated in favor of a new paid-for application (grr), it's still a great way to analyze your drive's read and write speeds. For example, it's one of the best ways to figure out if your 52X burner is actually performing at 40X for some unknown reason--measurements like that aren't really the kind of thing that an average user can estimate by how the reading or writing process "feels." Get the real seek times, transfer rates, and other measurements with this helpful application.

Download it here!

HDDScan

What it does: This free application gives you a host of options for checking on the health of your hard drives. Pull up the drive's S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic information if you're just interested in a quick scan. If any statistic looks out-of-place or otherwise dangerous, the program will alert you via colored icons on the side of each piece of information. From there, you can conduct more thorough evaluations by using the application to run offline S.M.A.R.T. testing of any drive in your system, even those connected to your PC via USB or FireWire. If you're concerned about your system's airflow, the program will even display real-time temperature readings from your drives as icons on the lower-right hand side of Windows' taskbar.

Download it here!

Memtest86

What it does: It's an oldie, but a goodie. I have yet to find a more thorough or easier-to-use method for evaluating the health of your system's memory. Even Maximum PC itself agrees with me on this one. In fact, it's well worth your time to click that link and read about how you can use Memtest86 to your greatest advantage. If you're experience blue screens that have seemingly come out of nowhere and they match the qualifications of a typical memory issue (either the PFN_LIST_CORRUPT or PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA error messages), run Memtest86 as soon as you can to help you pinpoint the problem.

Download it here!

Know of any other unique programs for measuring the health of your PC? Need some help analyzing the results of what you've found? PC on fire? Hit up David Murphy @Acererak with your freeware recommendations, applications questions, and pleas for water.

Report: GPS System Could be in Trouble

Andy Salisbury — Wed, 20 May 2009 17:38:04 -0500

Thanks to a recent report, a new worst-case scenario has been proposed that details the downfall of the modern GPS system, as we know it.

The report, distributed by the Government Accounting Office, states that our nation’s GPS could begin to fail sometime next year. Our GPS system has supposedly been extremely mismanaged, and when the aging equipment used to keep it all running begins to fail there will be no new satellites to take their place.

“If the Air Force does not meet its scheduled goals for development of GPS IIIA satellites, there will be an increased likelihood that… the overall GPS constellation will fall below the number of satellites required to provide the level of GPS service that the U.S. government commits to,” says the report.

It also notes that the Air Force has failed to build successful GPS satellites within the cost and schedule constraints provided to it.

Image Credit: AP

Getting the Lowdown on Seagate and Maxtor Firmware Fixes

Mark Edward Soper — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:24:40 -0600

As our own Paul Lilly's been telling us recently, many Seagate hard disks have been afflicted by firmware woes. Unfortunately, Seagate's first attempt to fix the problem wound up turning working drives into high-tech bricks.

As it turns out, both Seagate and Maxtor-brand SATA drives can be affected by firmware problems. So, how can you find out exactly which models may be on the naughty list and when Seagate has a firmware fix that's ready for prime time? Here's how.

To determine if you have a drive that's affected, you need to know the drive's model number, firmware revision, and serial number. Seagate offers the free Drive Detect utility, which displays this information.

You can also determine the drive's model number by opening Device Manager in Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7, and expanding the Disk Drives category. To view the firmware revision, open the Details tab (if present) and select Hardware IDs from the pull-down menu. The firmware revision is listed thus (Windows 7 Beta shown, Windows XP and Vista are similar):

The serial number is listed on the drive's faceplace, or you can find it on the original box.

Once you know this information, open Seagate KB article 207931 and look up your drive. The following families of drives are affected:

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA(160GB, 320GB, 500GB, 640GB, 750GB, 1TB, 1.5TB capacities)
Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SATA (250GB, 500GB, 750GB, 1TB)
Maxtor DiamondMax 22 SATA (160GB, 320GB, 500GB, 750GB, 1TB capacities)

See the KB article for specific model numbers.

To find out which firmware revisions need to be updated, and to be notified when a working update is available, click the link for your drive family. When recommended firmware is available, the download link will be posted. As an alternative to revisiting the drive family's page until the firmware update is posted, click the Subscribe icon and enter your email address. Seagate will send you an email when the page is updated.

In the meantime, follow the links on Paul Lilly's report on firmware problems to see how other users are dealing with the problem - and, back up your drives!

Seagate Barracuda Drives Failing at an Alarming Rate. Are You Affected?

Paul Lilly — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 14:15:10 -0600

According to news site The Register, Seagate's 1TB Barracuda hard drives are giving up the ghost "at an alarming rate." Users all across the globe have started complaining of lockups, non-detection in the BIOS, 0GB reported disc size, and other ailments, as reported by The Register and forum threads like the one at MSFN (Microsoft Software Forum Network).

If true, the problem appears to affect Barracuda 7200.11 drives made in Thailand (ST3100034AS) with firmware SD15. Users claim the reported failures are higher than what would be considered normal for hard drives, and adding insult to injury, some users are complaining of deleted and edited posts in an 18+ page support thread on Seagate's own forum.

And for you conspiracy theorists out there, while no Seagate Knowledge Base article yet exists on this specific topic, the company did recently reduce its bare drive warranty period from 5 to 3 years. For you non-conspiracy theorists, that means your drive is still under warranty.

Update 1/16/09 - Seagate Responds

Seagate sent us an update regarding the failures and what steps potentially affected users can take to both resolve the issue and recover data. Full statement below:

Seagate has isolated a potential firmware issue in certain products, including some Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives and related drive families based on this product platform, manufactured through December 2008. In some circumstances, the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on*.

As part of our commitment to customer satisfaction, we are offering a free firmware upgrade to those with affected products. To determine whether your product is affected, please visit the Seagate Support web site at http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931.

Support is also available through Seagate's call center: 1-800-SEAGATE (1 800 732-4283)

Customers can expedite assistance by sending an email to Seagate (discsupport@seagate.com). Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. We will respond, promptly, to your email request with appropriate instructions. There is no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive. But if you are unable to access your data due to this issue, Seagate will provide free data recovery services. Seagate will work with you to expedite a remedy to minimize any disruption to you or your business.

For a list of international telephone numbers to Seagate Support and alternative methods of contact, please access http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/

*There is no safety issue with these products.

Nvidia Tells Partners, "Our Old Mobile GPUs Bad, Buy Our New GPUs Instead"

Mark Edward Soper — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:08:37 -0600

As we reported earlier this year, Nvidia GeForce 8M series mobile GPUs have seen an abnormally high failure rate . VR-Zone and The Inquirer report that Nvidia has a solution for its OEM laptop partners: buy their new mobile GPUs instead.

The old GPU is known as the NB8E-SE, and is used, according to VR-Zone, in notebooks running the GeForce 8700M GT, 8800M GS, and GeForce 9650M GS. The new GPU, the NB8E-SET (aka the G84-751) uses Hitachi underfill packaging for more reliability.

If you're in the market for a new Nvidia-powered notebook computer, it's worth finding out from the laptop maker if they've switched to the new GPU already. However, what should you do if your new (or not-so-new) notebook has one of the old-design GPUs onboard?

Both Dell and HP have produced BIOS updates for affected models; the update provides improved cooling to help delay GPU failure. Unfortunately, some new laptops, including some examples of Apple's new unibody MacBook Pro with the 15-inch screen, continue to use problem GPUs.

If you have lockups or crashes when gaming or performing other graphics-intensive games on your Nvidia-equipped laptop, you may have an affected unit. Contact your vendor for help - and try to get a replacement GPU that uses Hitachi underfill material if you can.

Image courtesy Nvidia.

Nvidia Responds to Notebook Chip Failures, Gets Defensive

Paul Lilly — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 11:51:28 -0500

By now everyone is familiar with the problems Nvidia has had with its notebook GPUs, which resulted in an "abnormal failure rate" for what remains an unspecified number of graphics chips. But throughout all the speculation, including accusations that whatever problem has been plaguing the chip maker might also be affecting desktop units as well, Nvidia has avoided speaking out on the issue at any length. Until now, thanks to some prodding by AMD.

Earlier this week AMD's Packaging and Interconnect Director, Neil McLellan, went on the semi-offensive and said Nvidia not only uses inferior materials for its chip package design, but that the company just doesn't care as much about packaging technologies as AMD does, according to The Tech Report. Ouch. Those comments didn't sit well with Nvidia, who fired back in a letter in defense of its position.

"In his recent commentary on chip packaging, Mr. McLellan makes a number of speculative assertions about NVIDIA's people, products and philosophy," Nvidia wrote. "In his interview McLellan asserts that High lead bumps are more prone to fatigue. What he fails to note is that AMD currently uses High lead bumps on their CPU line -- a device well known to undergo high thermal stress, and also go through lots of power cycling."

Nvidia went on to talk about High Lead bumps being used in "10s of billions of semiconductor devices" and a whole lot more, but stopped short of saying what exactly caused earlier problems with its 8M series.

Anyone up for a round 2 of AMD versus Nvidia?

Image Credit: Nvidia

Exclusive Interview: Microsoft Admits What Went Wrong with Vista, and How They Fixed It

Will Smith — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:15:00 -0500

Update: Be sure to check out our thoughts on what Microsoft MUST change for Windows 7

We sat down with Microsoft to hear the company’s side of the Vista story. What lessons have been learned following the worst

Windows launch in the company’s history? Is Microsoft doing enough to regain PC users’ faith?

Way back in January 2007, after years of hype and anticipation, Microsoft unveiled Windows Vista to a decidedly lukewarm reception by the PC community, IT pros, and tech journalists alike. Instead of a revolutionary next-generation OS that was chock-full of new features, the Windows community got an underwhelming rehash with very little going for it. Oh, and Vista was plagued with performance and incompatibility problems to boot.

Since then, the PC community has taken the idea that Vista is underwhelming and turned it into a mantra. We’ve all heard about Vista’s poor network transfer speeds, low frame rates in games, and driver issues—shoot, we’ve experienced the problems ourselves. But over the last 18 months, Vista has undergone myriad changes, including the release of Service Pack 1, making the OS worth a second look. It’s time we determine once and for all whether we should stick with XP for the next 18 months while we wait for Windows 7. But before we answer that question, let’s review exactly what’s wrong with Windows Vista.

What Went Wrong with Vista’s Launch?

We’ve seen worse launches over the years, but not from a multibillion dollar product that was a half-decade in the making. Here are the seven biggest contributors to Vista’s dud of a debut

Instability

At launch, we complained that Vista was significantly less stable than its predecessor. We experienced more hard locks, crashes, and blue screens in the first weeks of use than we had in the entire year prior using XP. Sadly for Microsoft, our experience was shared by many early Vista users.

The problems weren’t limited to high-end, bleeding-edge hardware, either. People with pedestrian, nonexotic hardware configs reported crashes, instability, and general wonkiness with Vista on laptops and desktops, in homebuilt rigs and OEM machines, and in PCs that originally shipped with XP. Considering that improved stability was one of the biggest promises Microsoft made for Vista, users were understandably upset.

The Problem Reports and Solutions wizard finds lots of problems but few solutions.

Incompatibility

Microsoft didn’t make any big promises about application compatibility, and it’s a damn good thing. If a desktop application didn’t follow Vista’s rules for behavior, Vista wouldn’t let it run. The program would fail to load, crash on use, or eat the user’s data, depending on the development infraction. And to be clear, we’re not talking about shareware apps created by some dude in his basement, we’re talking about Acrobat Reader, iTunes, Trillian, and dozens of other programs, not even counting the antivirus programs that are rarely compatible with a new OS.

Getting hardware working could be just as challenging. If you had one of the millions of perfectly serviceable, but suddenly incompatible printers or scanners, you probably felt pretty raw. We know we did.

Additionally, if you needed to connect to a VPN (virtual private network) that isn’t supported by Vista’s built-in client, you were probably out of luck. Vista shipped without support from major VPN manufacturers, including Cisco, leaving work-at-home types out in the cold.

The massive number of compatibility problems ensured that every user would be touched by at least one disappointment.

Performance

We would expect a new version of Windows to be slower than the previous one, given immature drivers and new features that drain CPU cycles and absorb memory. However, the performance differential has always been less than 10 percent in the past and only really evident in hardware-intensive apps, such as games.

At Vista’s launch, our tests revealed worse-than-expected performance in many different tasks and applications. Gaming performance suffered notably; using drivers from the launch time frame, our tests showed as much as a 20 percent performance difference between Vista and XP on the same machine. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Even common tasks suffered. Large network file transfers took a ludicrous amount of time, even on systems hardwired to gigabit networks. On affected machines, Vista could take days to transfer a full gigabyte of data! While that was a worst-case scenario, many users complained that file transfers took twice as long to complete in Vista as in XP.

The Reliability Monitor provides a general idea of how stable your machine is. All our rigs are unstable.

User Account Control

Vista brought marked improvements to the overall security of Windows, one of the few areas in which the OS actually lived up to Microsoft’s promises. Unfortunately, one of the mechanisms that helps enable that security comes at a high cost—it’s incredibly annoying.

That’s right, we’re talking about User Account Control, aka UAC. Even if you don’t know what it’s called, if you’ve used Vista, you’re undoubtedly aware that you need to prepare your clicking finger when the desktop darkens and your trusty PC starts asking whether you really meant to install that application you just double-clicked. UAC prompts you whenever an app tries to write to an area of your hard disk or registry that Windows finds suspicious. This seems like a good thing, right? It would be, except UAC prompts every time the installer does something suspicious. We’ve had Vista prompt us no fewer than five times before completing installs it questioned.

The problem is compounded by the fact that those five prompts look and behave differently, even though they’re all asking for basically the same thing: permission to write to a protected area of your system. To make matters even worse, none of the UAC prompts actually tells power users what the app is doing. When you click that Allow button, all you’re doing is adding a speed bump to whatever malware you might be installing.

Executed properly, UAC could have been a savior for people wont to install every application they find. Unfortunately, the UAC prompts quickly become so annoying that most users either disable them (the power-user option) or mindlessly click Allow (the mom option).

Activation

Activation has been a hassle since Microsoft first included it with Windows XP. Microsoft’s never really honored its stated 90-day limit for discarding activation information either. After installing the OS once or twice, you inevitably have to call some poor sap manning the activation hotline to enable Windows. What bothers us about Vista is the inclusion of the Windows Genuine Advantage software, which periodically checks in with Microsoft to ensure that the copy of Windows you’ve already activated remains genuine.

That’s all well and good, unless something confuses WGA. Unfortunately, just about everything confuses WGA. It could be something as simple as a BIOS reset that sets the clock back a few years. Or it could be that Microsoft’s entire activation process shuts down for a few hours—like it did last August. But at least Microsoft curbs piracy of Vista and other activated software by treating its customers like criminals, right? Well, not so much. Hacked versions of Vista that simply bypass activation are available on BitTorrent sites around the world.

Version Overload

In the old days, there were two distinct versions of Windows: one for home users and one for corporate users. For home, you bought Windows 98; IT departments bought Windows NT (at least the serious ones did). With Windows XP, this trend continued, despite the fact that both the home and enterprise OSes used the same core.

With Vista, the old home and enterprise distinctions went out the window, as Microsoft added three more versions of Windows, removing crucial features like the 3D UI from the low-end release and forcing power users who want access to both work-friendly and enthusiast features to shell out for the $400 Ultimate edition. To help justify that exorbitant price, Microsoft promised Ultimate Extras, the first of which didn’t materialize until months after launch, and those that did appear were disappointing. A bad Texas Hold ’Em game, a backup utility that should have been included in every box, and support for other languages do not “ultimate extras” make.

Oh, and if you used Windows XP Professional at home and wanted to upgrade to a less-expensive home version of Vista, you were out of luck. The only upgrade path that worked from XP Pro to anything with Media Center capability was the spendy Ultimate edition.

‘One More Thing’

If the last eight years of watching Steve Jobs smugly introduce “one more thing” have taught us anything, it’s that no matter how technically sound (or alternately, how fatally flawed) a product is, every major release desperately needs one or two supersexy features to incite lust in geeks everywhere. Every time Jobs rolls out a new product, he teases the audience with a feature or two that you simply cannot wait to use. These features not only leave customers clamoring for the new product but also give those pesky users sitting on the fence a rationale for upgrading. While Vista had the technical chops in the form of the Aero renderer to deliver some potentially astounding apps, Microsoft’s best effort was Flip3D—a gimpy knock-off of a feature that OS X implemented infinitely better.

Aside from that, most of the apps included with Vista are rote updates of their forebears—from Movie Maker to Photo Gallery. There’s very little that’s new, even when the apps themselves are brand-new (see Windows Mail). Worse than nothing new, there’s not much in a stock Windows install to inspire anyone—even the stereotypical dullard PC user.

Next: DirectX 10, and XP vs. Vista: The Benchmarks!

An Exercise in Angering Potential Customers: DirectX 10

Vista was supposed to mark the launch of a new revolution in PC gaming, spearheaded by the full might of Microsoft as manifested in the Games for Windows initiative. With promises of everything from a fully fledged online matchmaking experience (a la Xbox Live), easier installations, and (most importantly) a host of killer AAA titles, Games for Windows looked poised to really challenge console dominance and modernize the PC as a gaming platform.

What Games for Windows actually did was tie the DirectX 10 API to Vista simply to drive sales of the OS. The first Vista-exclusive AAA Games for Windows title was a downright geriatric port of Halo 2, a game that originated with the first Xbox and doesn’t use DirectX 10! To add insult to injury, there was no technical reason for a three-year-old ported Xbox game to be Vista-only. True, the community quickly released a patch that opened the door for XP gamers, but we still can’t understand who possibly thought this was a good idea.

Microsoft continued down the suicidal Vista-only path for one more release, Shadowrun. Despite innovative gameplay and cross-platform support for its Xbox counterpart, the Vista-only release was enough to doom FASA Interactive, the studio that created the game.

The Benchmarks

We take a quantitative look at Vista and XP performance to determine exactly what penalty, if any, you pay when you upgrade to Windows Vista

To test Vista versus XP performance, we built what we think is a fairly middle-of-the-road rig—an Intel Q6600 quad core with 2GB of memory and a GeForce 8800 GTS videocard. We then ran a battery of benchmarks in three different OS environments: XP with Service Pack 3, Vista sans Service Pack 1 (with modern Nvidia drivers installed), and Vista with SP1. Our tests measure everything from overall system performance to network speed to gaming prowess.

Overall Performance

Unsurprisingly, Windows XP remains faster in almost all of our standard system benchmarks. More noteworthy is how SP1 has improved Vista’s performance, narrowing the gap between that OS and XP in key tests and even allowing Vista to surpass XP in our MainConcept encoder test.

Unfortunately for Vista, our desktop benchmarks do reveal areas where Vista continues to suffer substantial performance hits compared to XP, namely in ProShow and Quake 4. We’ve talked to the ProShow developers, and they don’t know what causes the slowdown with their app in Vista, but they’re investigating. We attribute the Quake 4 performance hit to poor OpenGL drivers in Vista.

As we mentioned before, we’re perfectly willing to sacrifice a few percentage points of performance from an operating system upgrade. However, the difference between Vista SP1 and XP SP3 in ProShow and Quake 4 reaches a dismal 10 to 25 percent.

Gaming

We didn’t include any DirectX 10 games in our tests simply because DirectX 10 wasn’t around when Vista launched, and DirectX 10 graphics still aren’t supported on Windows XP. Our basic system benchmarks already include a pair of games, FEAR and Quake 4, but we tossed in an additional round of 3DMark06 to further assess Vista’s gaming prowess.

The results were informative. Aside from the already noted Quake 4/OpenGL deficiency, Vista performed admirably both with and without SP1, turning in scores equivalent to XP’s. This tells us that the poor gaming performance we saw in the early days of Vista was more the result of immature drivers than issues with the OS. Of course, Microsoft can still be blamed for shoddy coordination with the graphics-card makers at the time of Vista’s launch.

Network Transfer Speed

Our final set of benchmarks test networking performance. We set up the fastest NAS box we’ve ever tested, the QNAP TS-109 Pro, and ran our standard network storage benchmarks on it. While we saw the same stunning performance inadequacies from pre-SP1 Vista that we observed at the OS’s launch, SP1 and the subsequent updates seem to have solved most of those issues. The minor gaps of a few seconds that do exist between XP and Vista SP1 are explained by the fact that XP shuts the file transfer window before the transfer is confirmed, while Vista waits until it has checked the copied file.

The Takeaway

With the exception of a couple outlier applications, Vista’s performance is within striking distance of XP’s, for the most part. Thanks largely to a series of performance enhancements and SP1, Vista has closed the gap in many areas where it was deficient. We’re willing to overlook the poor OpenGL gaming performance simply because there aren’t very many OpenGL games coming out, and it seems the ProShow problem is an isolated incident.

Overall System Performance

	Windows XP (SP3)	Windows Vista (Launch)	Windows Vista (SP1)
Premiere Pro CS3 (sec)	924	960	960
Photoshop CS3 (sec)	133	136	139
ProShow (sec)	963	1214	1275
MainConcept (sec)	1881	1822	1814
Quake 4 (fps)	143.5	126.5	125.8
FEAR (fps)	65	65	65

Best scores are bolded. These are our standard system benchmarks, with one exception. We ran the games at 1920x1200 resolution, with 4x AA and 16x anisotropic filtering on FEAR, no AA and no anisotropic filtering on Quake 4.

Gaming Performance

	Windows XP (SP3)	Windows Vista (Launch)	Windows Vista (SP1)
3DMark06 Game 1 (fps)	29	28	28
3DMark06 Game 2 (fps)	26	26	26

Network Transfer Speeds

	Windows XP (SP3)	Windows Vista (Launch)	Windows Vista (SP1)
Network - Small to NAS (sec)	38	48	43
Network - Small from NAS (sec)	39	68	42
Network - Large to NAS (sec)	139	181	144
Network - Large from NAS (sec)	140	271	142

Best scores are bolded. Idle temperatures were measured after an hour of inactivity; load temperatures were measured after an hour’s worth of CPU Burn-In (four instances). Test system consists of a stock-clock Q6700 processor on an EVGA 680i motherboard.

Next: Microsoft Concedes Vista Launch Problems!

Microsoft Concedes Vista Launch Problems

Abandoning the pretense that Vista is the perfect OS, Microsoft reps sat down with us to discuss the OS’s problems in a (kind of) frank conversation

We were surprised when Microsoft reps agreed to discuss Vista’s launch problems and what the company has done to fix them. We were surprised not only that they agreed to answer our questions with candor, but that they were speaking to us at all. Our initial conversation occurred in June and set the stage for the article you’re reading. This dialogue also marked the first time in eight years that we had a private conversation with any Microsoft employee without a PR manager present.

The answers we got during this mid-June background conversation were brutally honest: Our source, a high-ranking Windows product manager, conceded that Microsoft botched the Vista launch. He added that the company’s biggest concern wasn’t the OS but rather the eroded faith in Microsoft’s flagship product among users of all types and experience levels.

Our conversation was refreshingly frank, and no topic appeared off limits. To wit:

Our Microsoft source blamed bad drivers from GPU companies and printer companies for the majority of Vista’s early stability problems.|
He described User Account Control as poorly implemented but defended it as necessary for the continued health of the Windows platform.
He admitted that spending the money to port DirectX 10 to Windows XP would have been worth the expense.
He assailed OEM system builders for including bad, buggy, or just plain useless apps on their machines in exchange for a few bucks on the back end.
He described the Games for Windows initiative as a disaster, with nothing more than 64-bit compatibility for games to show for years of effort.
He conceded that Apple appeals to more and more consumers because the hardware is slick, the price is OK, and Apple doesn’t annoy its customers (or allow third parties to).

Yes, the June conversation was dazzlingly candid, and we were looking forward to an equally blunt follow-up meeting—a scheduled late-July on-the-record interview with Erik Lustig, a senior product manager responsible for Windows Fundamentals. But then the universe as we know it returned to normal, and Microsoft became Microsoft again. Our interview with Lustig was overseen by a PR representative and was filled with the type of carefully measured language that we’ve come to expect from Microsoft when discussing “challenges.” A “challenge” is Microsoftese for anything that isn’t going according to the company’s carefully choreographed plans. In the text that follows, we’ve combined the information conveyed during the mid-June background conversation with decoded translations of the “on the record” conversation we had in July. The contrast between the two interviews is stunning.

We herewith give you a snapshot of Microsoft’s take on Vista launch problems.

Stability

According to now-public internal Microsoft memos, 18 percent of all Vista crashes reported during the months immediately following its launch were due to unstable Nvidia graphics card drivers.

Microsoft has never issued any public comment concerning who’s to blame for the driver crashes, but during our background conversation, our source conceded that hardware OEMs were writing WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) drivers for a moving target during Vista’s beta and release-candidate periods. Our source told us that because of low-level OS changes, hardware vendors didn’t have sufficient time to develop and test their drivers. This mirrors what Steven Sinofsky, the head of the Windows team, said in an interview with Cnet earlier this year: “The schedule challenges that we had, and the information disclosure weren’t consistent with the realities of the project, which made it all a much trickier end point when we got to general availability in January.”

Launch problems aside, once Vista is updated with SP1, it seems much more reliable than it was early on. The Maximum PC Lab isn’t equipped for long-term stability testing, but in our anecdotal experience, Vista’s stability problems are largely fixed, even on somewhat exotic hardware. Whether Vista is more stable than WinXP really depends on the actual hardware configuration you’re using more than anything else.

Compatibility

While discussing this story on background, Microsoft placed blame for incompatible software and hardware on its third-party partners. However, during our on-the-record chat, Lustig simply said, “I honestly don’t have the exact numbers for that,” in reference to the ratio of crashes attributed to Microsoft versus third-party entities.

Regardless, we’re well aware that Microsoft had been talking to hardware and software developers about Vista compatibility issues since the 2005 Meltdown, Microsoft’s annual gaming conference. At that conference, Microsoft informed game developers that they needed to write apps that behaved well, or they would face problems with Vista. The requirements were, for the most part, simple—caveats like not writing to C:/Program Files/ or C:/Windows/.

It’s also important to note a shameful truth that everyone in the PC industry is aware of but rarely discusses: When a new OS comes out, third-party vendors will often withhold compatibility support in order to drive sales of new units, turning the cost of supporting a new OS from a liability into a source of revenue. The same goes for software like antivirus utilities and some CD/DVD burning apps, both of which hook into the OS very closely.

Security

The statistics on Vista’s security record are clear: Vista is the most secure version of Windows to date. Nonetheless, Lustig said that Microsoft made “changes that have had some short-term ramifications that we’ve worked very hard the last year and a half, and through Service Pack 1, to address.” Some of these changes may have had unintended negative consequences, but Vista has suffered fewer security defects than any previous version of Windows. In short, sometimes you just have to give up flexibility for security. As Lustig told us, “I believe that those changes are going to be a fundamental basis for the integrity of the platform.” We agree.

Gaming Performance

During our initial June interview, Microsoft blamed unoptimized videocard drivers for poor gaming performance. To confirm this, we tested both the launch version of Vista and the post-SP1 version of Vista with current Nvidia drivers. Our gaming tests showed only the most negligible performance differences between the two OS builds, confirming that Vista itself was not to blame for early game performance issues. Rather, those earliest Vista videocard drivers were the culprits. Indeed, now 18 months after its launch, Vista’s performance is within striking distance of WinXP’s in almost every test we ran.

The Impact of SP1

Because Vista’s first Service Pack significantly improved the struggling OS, we were surprised that Microsoft didn’t tack a Second Edition label on it, a la Windows 98. Providing measurable improvements in performance and stability, Service Pack 1 should have been Vista’s saving grace. No? Lustig told us that despite significant improvements in most of Vista’s deficient areas, “there is a lot of leftover concern [about Vista] based on information folks have heard anecdotally.”

Quite an admission. Lustig continued, “The challenge for Microsoft isn’t necessarily continuing to take the feedback and improving the product—we’ve been doing that since launch and will continue to. The challenge is getting the message out that we’ve listened, we’ve made very positive changes, we’re seeing very positive results from the changes we’ve made, and there’s enough value in the product.”

Maximum PC's Final Word on Vista

After spending the last six weeks getting down and dirty with the OS—on multiple hardware configurations, in both 64-bit and 32-bit flavors, and on mobile and desktop systems—we’re willing to give it a second chance. There are still tons of things about the OS we’re not happy with—starting with the now-$350 Ultimate SKU and working down from there—but from a performance, stability, and security standpoint, we’re satisfied with where Vista is today. You no longer need to sacrifice performance or stability if you want to run the latest version of Windows.

If you already have Vista, there’s no reason not to use it, but should you go out and buy Vista today? Probably not. With Windows 7’s launch scheduled for early 2010, we’re actually closer to that date than we are to Vista’s launch. If you’ve ridden out the storm on XP so far, it probably isn’t worth investing in Vista for just a year and a half of use.

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