Now THAT is a delicious looking piece of pie. That’s the size of slice I like when everyone else at the table’s on a diet. “Yeah, you know what?,” I’ll say, “Gimme a huge piece, like a real man-piece. You went to all this trouble to bake this delicious pie and I’d love to eat almost 29 percent of it in one sitting if nobody else minds.”
Anyway, Ars Technica is reporting data from 158 pages of Microsoft e-mails, one of which contains the above figures. You’ll notice that NVIDIA accounts for about 29% of Vista crashes, while Microsoft and “Unknown” account for almost 35% combined. I’m inclined to propose that “Unknown” should be considered a Microsoft problem until someone can figure out what’s causing those crashes.
Ars also points out the following…
The data points in the table cover an unspecified period in 2007, and Microsoft makes no attempt to break the aggregate data down into which device drivers, specifically, returned the highest number of crashes. If the number of failures were split by month and then graphed, we’d presumably see the number of NVIDIA driver failures per month decreasing as the company slowly brought its driver issues under control.
…so take that into consideration.
Whatever the severity of NVIDIA’s involvement, I can personally vouch for some wonkiness here and there — mostly graphics settings being forgotten when the computer comes out of sleep or hibernation modes — involving NVIDIA cards on my Sony VAIO VGN-SZ650 notebook and an HP s3100n desktop, but I haven’t had any major meltdowns that can be attributed to the graphics drivers on either system.
Your thoughts? Anyone having graphics problems with Vista?
Does anyone have a problem with a graphic that shows percentages that add up to more than 100? I totaled it up to 100.3…does anyone else want to verify my math?
Wow. Nice catch. How in the world did you notice that? The actual data used by Ars Technica to make that chart comes from numbers that were rounded up or down from hundredths to tenths, hence the discrepancy.
Haha, same result Rob.
Anyway, My Vista machine doesn’t crash too often, maybe I’m one of the lucky ones.
On my Dell since Vista (with Quadro NVS 110M) the use of external or dual monitors is a constant nightmare. The machine cannot remember the arrangement or resolution of monitors, and with a KVM resets config every time the KVM is used. I’ve been to the display dialog box 11 million times in the past 12 months. Dell of course doesn’t care or react. nVidia has issued updates that do not fix the problems. As of today, they’re still horrible.
My Sony VAIO laptop (VGN SZ370P) with nVidia GeForce7400 display adapter crashes constantly after installing Vista. I just performed a clean install of Vista 3 days ago and have had 15 crashes from nVidia since then. Interestingly their website says that the problems attributed to them by MS are not usually REALLY their fault – but I can tell you that my display flickers / goes black / gets fuzzy before crashing – so this one is definitely an nVidia issue. So lame.