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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.

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It's not entirely clear whether that statistic is referring to operating system crashes (i.e. BSOD) or third-party application crashes, especially since it's listed together with the "most common crashing apps".

Edit - Nevermind, blue screens are listed in a separate section below. So I'm going to conclude that these are application-level crashes.

I have the same impression. Windows 7 is very solid. People still think that "windows is crashing", while the application is working incorrectly. Microsoft people do what they can (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html - The Two Forces at Microsoft part). I understand that "normal users" might not see the difference, but people who attempt to perform "statistical analysis" should do.

BTW without knowing what is "Based on Soluto community data" we can't really judge if their analysis has any sense.

I just read this entire article on the way to work and I have to say it's one of the best written and most informative pieces I've had the luck to come across on here.

Personally, I'm ill informed with most "software" languages and mostly use web languages and some c++ in my spare time projects, but this gave me quite in depth knowledge without getting overly technical.

I would definitely recommend a read to everyone scrolling past this comment.

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.

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.

I'm not sure about this, but I don't think that these are kernel-level crashes - just plain old user-mode application crashes (ie not something that crashes the whole computer).

It's interesting that windows explorer under windows 8 is crashing that much. I guess there's a lot of new code in it.

It could also just be it being unresponsive and people click “close this application” instead of “wait until it responds again”, which I believe gets classified as an application crash by the system as well (but I'm not sure). In any case, such unresponsiveness can be caused by a non-available network connection already.

And that makes the crash ok? Applications shouldn't be non-responsive period, even if the network becomes unavailable they should at least fail gracefully.

Whenever I shutdown/restart Windows 8 for my monthly update (or whenever my machine gets too slow), most of my applications crash out (meaning, they can't shutdown in time for Windows to complain about it and ask you to crash the apps explicitly). This is with decent network.

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.

It's a very different web service now.

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.

Device Driver quality is usually the culprit. 90% of my OS X kernel panics are related to USB Hot Plug/Play (now that I think of - maybe one of the reasons why iPads don't have any type of USB Expansion)

I've been running Windows 8 over a year, the only time I had "crashes" when was my SSD was going out. Can hardly blame that on the OS.

Windows Server 2012 is a whole other story for me though.

I dont think its about blame. It is about how people experience the ecosystem as a whole. The average windows computer may consist of hardware and software from tens of different vendors, but for the end user something eiher works or it does not.

It's the program crashes, not the OS ones. Bluescreens are in the next section.

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