> Every time I update Windows, or even restart my windows laptop I hope that it'll still work afterwards.

That's strange. I'm now sitting in front of a Windows box that had W7 installed on it 3 years ago. I've upgraded to W8, then swapped the SSD in it (restored to the new SSD from image), resized the system partition many times (it's a Windows-Linux dual boot box), then upgraded to W8.1, then Windows 10. Oh, this is the 3rd GPU in the machine. I have never, ever had any problems with Windows itself throughout the 3 years. (I had problems with Linux though.)

I have an EUR 2500 Macbook Pro as well from 2013, and the Windows box has always been more responsive/usable.

Anecdotal, I know.

Mo anecdote. I'm unable to update to Win8.1. It keeps asking me to, I've tried twice and it's downloaded everything, it installs, reverts, gives me error id 0x80070002 - 0x20009.

Googling: http://tipsandtricksforum.com/thread-154.html

"If you connected a second drive or any external drive to your PC (a SSD or HDD) the upgrade will fail if the second (original) drive is not disconnected."

Ok, I have a second internal drive but it's internal and I can't disconnect it easily. I must take my notebook in to update Windows?

Now I'm being badgered every week to update. This is not the user experience I'm looking for.

I use linux at work and run Windows 7 in a VM. It's domain joined and my company pushes updates to it seemingly many times a month. This rears it head more often than not when I'm going home for the day.. Sometimes I can't be bothered waiting for updates to install so I throw caution to the wind and power the VM off when it says not to... Still ticking!

I run the opposite on my home PC, Windows host and linux guest. Been through multiple video cards and even an intel to amd switch. Also still running like a champ.

Anecdata :)

Twice now I've been stuck during a power failure with just a few minutes of battery in my UPS, and when I try to shutdown Windows, it goes into its "installing updates" thing. There's no way around it, and of course losing power during this is probably the most dangerous thing imaginable. Luckily, I escaped with my life on both occasions.

When I use to dual boot windows I never updated and always "restarted" by just holding the power button down (stupid, yes I know, but it's the only way to reboot it as fast as I'm used to when booted into Linux). Never installed updates and it always worked fine, until I wanted to install updates, then everything broke. I assume this was just caused by waiting too long between updates. My solution was to delete the windows partition and just use a VM.

This is why I never shut down my laptop just before going home.

Just a heads up, you're probably going to have issues trying to go from the Windows 10 tech. preview to the actual release.

We'll see. MS claims I won't (http://winsupersite.com/windows-10/windows-technical-preview...). However, now in 2015 I can set up a Windows box in an hour or so thanks to Chocolatey (and to the coming OneGet).

(I have actually upgraded to 8.1 CTP I think, then continued all the way to 10)

My comment was anecdotal too, no worries ;)

The problem here is not Microsoft. I am surface pro 3 owner and i have to say that is one of the best machines i have used. I wouldn't change it for anything. I agree that MS is heading in the right direction. The steps that they are taking are to my opinion great for everyone. I have been a linux user for almost 10 years and windows 10 might be the reason to switch back. We will see.

As for the driver issues, that is cause windows releases the software and then the hardware is provided by several companies which is up to them to not screw up there drivers. For apple they release one laptop and that is it. They only have to cater for that device which makes it a hell of a lot easier.

Windows 8, has made huge progress in every hardware aspect of the machine.

To me, as the user, whose fault it is could not matter less. I only care if the system works or not. In the event of a driver failure, knowing it's not MS's fault makes the failure no less impactful.

Do you think that Windows 8 made progress because your machine works or for technical reasons? Because driver issues seem to be pretty common on Windows 8. And the OS offer little support in fixing those issues when windows update fails to get the drivers right. Nor does the OS warn you or gracefully degrade when things are not working properly. I would much prefer the approach taken by Chrome that simply turns features off (like OpenGL) where support is lacking.

It absolutely is Microsoft's... well, not fault, exactly, but the way the ecosystem has evolved has been driven largely by choices they've made. If the ecosystem allows for buggy hardware driver releases to screw things up for customers, it's because MS made the choice, possibly by default, not to run an Apple-like ecosystem.

The reason I don't blame MS entirely for this is because it's clearly a trade-off. In return for the risk of unreliability, they got a vast increase in the number of hardware manufacturers willing to play in their ecosystem, precisely because MS can be fairly hands-off. This drives prices down, and increases the size of the market-place.

Where I do take issue with MS directly is that despite consciously being in the driving seat of an ecosystem like this for so long, it's taken them years to successfully isolate the user from buggy drivers. They control the OS, so they control the ability of a manufacturer's bug to affect the user. It's not a foregone conclusion that a screwed-up driver must inevitably lead to a bluescreen, or anything like it.

>They control the OS, so they control the ability of a manufacturer's bug to affect the user.

Ugh, kernel drivers will always have bugs and that cannot be isolated from the user all the time. As you stated, the decisions Microsoft took got them to their throne.

I've switched to OSX but i still use Windows 10 on my other laptop and Windows 8.1 on my gaming PC and haven't had a bluescreen since Vista. I literally have never seen it for years. I was shocked to see it changed appearance in a screenshot in an article about Windows 8. And the "upgrade" to Yosemite has completely destroyed my wifi stability, made the system sluggish (Safari even decides to stop smooth scrolling after a few hours), boot time has pretty much doubled with the same amount of apps installed (SSD too).

> Ugh, kernel drivers will always have bugs and that cannot be isolated from the user all the time.

And MS are in control of how much of a driver needs to be in the kernel. It's not a foregone conclusion that a driver bug cannot be isolated from the user. The techniques involved aren't new. Hell, I don't think they were new when Windows 95 was being written. Again, it's a trade-off; it's easier to write an OS where a driver lives by default in kernel space (certainly with reasonable performance), and where to draw that dividing line is a choice which Microsoft made. They've introduced user-mode drivers for some things, and this is a very good thing.

I don't have a dog in the OS X/Windows reliability pissing match, but part of the reason you won't have seen a bluescreen in years is because Windows 7 (apart from being more reliable from having more man-hours thrown at it, along with an updated driver model from Vista) changed the default behaviour: what would have caused a BSOD in Vista causes a reboot in 7, so you never actually see the error.

>I've switched to OSX but i still use Windows 10 on my other laptop and Windows 8.1 on my gaming PC and haven't had a bluescreen since Vista. I literally have never seen it for years.

I can reproducibly blue screen Windows 8.1 with the latest ATI drivers (as well as every driver for the last year and a half) by watching hardware accelerated Flash movies on an ATI HD 7770 GHz Edition. Swapping the card to a different ATI card fixes it. Swapping the card to an nVidia card fixes it. Swapping the 7770 GHz for another 7770 GHz does not fix it.

This only happens in Windows. It does not happen with the ATI drivers in Linux.

Microsoft were not initially in control of the ecosystem; it was IBM's PC cloned by Compaq and then a horde of others. At one point there were competing desktop environments - Desqview, OS/2.

They then faced the upgrade problem: at any point, restrictive control over drivers would mean that hardware that ran Windows N-1 would not run Windows N.

There is also the antitrust argument: control over the OEMs restricts the possibilities for competing software.

And there's a limit to what they can do. My latest driver/hardware bug was discovering that my Crucial MX100 has some horrible interaction with write caching and link power management such that it can vanish from underneath the operating system.

> Microsoft were not initially in control of the ecosystem; it was IBM's PC cloned by Compaq and then a horde of others. At one point there were competing desktop environments - Desqview, OS/2.

...

> There is also the antitrust argument: control over the OEMs restricts the possibilities for competing software.

Which of these arguments would you like to keep? You can't have both; or at least, they don't refer to overlapping time periods. And I'd take issue with either: in the first case, MS always had the option early on of carving a controlled niche rather than trying for wide appeal. That's exactly what early Apple did, and I'd argue that MS could have done precisely the same on PC hardware, if they'd chosen to. As regards the anti-trust argument, why don't we see that being levelled at Apple? An MS which chose to drive a more closed ecosystem probably wouldn't have been so utterly dominant as to run the risk of antitrust accusations, and again, that was their choice.

> They then faced the upgrade problem: at any point, restrictive control over drivers would mean that hardware that ran Windows N-1 would not run Windows N.

Again, that was their choice.

> And there's a limit to what they can do. My latest driver/hardware bug was discovering that my Crucial MX100 has some horrible interaction with write caching and link power management such that it can vanish from underneath the operating system.

I'd argue that this sort of problem affects either sort of ecosystem.

I've been running Win7 on a Dell Optiplex 980 for years, and have never had a BSOD. Except yesterday when I pressed Ctrl-Up arrow/Ctrl-Right/Ctrl-Down in Visual Studio. That was just asking for it :o)

(Ctrl-Up flips the screen).

I've been running Debian Wheezy Linux for years. A few minor issues in Word 2010 (it always opens on my top screen!) and playing GTA4. Never had a BSOD. :)

On the other hand, updating my Mac to Yosemite turned it into a slow stuttering mess - WindowServer memory leak forced me to reboot the Mac about every two hours or so or watch my desktop at < 1fps.

While Windows does have problems, latest Apple software is mostly worse bug and update-wise.

These kinds of issues are why I always suggest people do fresh installs of operating systems, and not upgrades.

I used to do that, then I released how many pieces of software I have installed, and tweaked and adjusted to my preferences. Usually there is little benefit to an upgrade so I just leave as is (or use a rolling release Linux distro).

I get similar memory leaks with WindowServer on a brand new macbook pro. The damn process is eating 4gb of ram sometimes...

I did a fresh install from a seemingly healthy, semi-recent MBP and Yosemite's WindowServer seemed to begin a slow strangulation on my machine.

Solved it by buying a top-of-the-line machine, which I'm sure Apple is loving.

I discovered a weird interaction between f.lux and fullscreen gaming. They seemed to fight about which gamma etc to use.

It was nothing you could see, and other than a jerky in-game mouse you did not notice it. And after an hour of playing, dying cmd+tabbing out to Safari to surf while waiting for respawn, WindowServer core dumped, logging out all users in an instant.

This is fixed in 10.10.3. The jerky mouse pointer problem still remains. I don't use f.lux anymore.

Gotta be a hardware issue of some variety. I'm running Yosemite on a MBPro Retina mid-2012 with zero issues at all.

Hmmmm, possibly my slow-as-could-be hard drive. The SSD in my newer machine really does make a HUGE difference, to speak obviously ;)

I have the feeling my old machine is using a bit of VRAM when WindowServer starts getting too heavy.

Updating my iMac to Yosemite fried the graphics card. It seems Apple is putting form way ahead of function, and as a result stuffing too hot components into too small space (the same iMac has previously fried the screen and the HDD to death).

And way back in time, Apple had even factory-disabled my second NVIDIA card on my MBP because it had created heating issues in tests. So, I installed gfx, or something, to get it working. And then, predictably, major major heating issues.

And it was easily solved! Apparently Apple (the rumor is Jobs ordered this, but who knows) didn't want the fans spinning too fast, which caused noise. So they governed the speed on those, too. Solved with SMC Fan Control.

I wasn't too happy about being somewhat deceived by their specs for my equipment, even if they thought their intentions were "good".

Thanks! I was just thinking I might take a chance, but at this point I'm actually thinking about reinstalling what came with the machine. These new operating systems are literally making me angry.

This comment just made me realize why most computers sold today wouldn't work in vacuum of space. Even if we shielded it from radiation, they'd just fry to death.

Yeah, but they've been doing that for years. Remember all the people burning themselves with Macbooks?

Everyone has different experience. I never had hardware problems with HP, Lenovo, Dell notebooks. It was built badly, it could broke something, but notebook worked well. With Macbook I had broken HDD which was replaced by warranty but it took almost a month without my working tool. And 2 years later sound just stopped working. Headphones work but buggy. I don't think I can pay for repair, probably will tinker with it myself.

My iPhone 4S had broken WiFi just after warranty expired. All cables from Mac and iPhone are in terrible state.

I don't really think that Apple hardware is better than others. Not worse than others, but not perfect. Choice is between OS X and Windows or iOS and Android. Otherwise there are many comparable machines.

> Everyone has different experience.

Yeah, I'm acutely reminded of this every time someone brings up Windows 7's predecessor. Apparently I'm the only person who ever lived on this planet who had absolutely zero problems with Windows Vista, and even liked it quite a bit.

Nah, aside from some minor annoyances that ended up getting polished in updates I didn't have any issues with it either. When it came out I wasn't making much money so I wasn't running top of the line hardware by any means. Still, it ran OK on my PC at the time (Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM, and some low-ish end nVidia GPU). Still, even my budget Newegg Special was better than the real dogs some people were buying at the time (or some of the older computers they were trying to upgrade).

Vista seemed like it was built to leverage the current hardware of the time rather than run nicely on weaker systems that companies were still selling because they could passably run WinXP (slow CPUs, 256-512MB RAM, integrated GPU). It made sense because both OSX and Linux were capable of GPU acceleration of desktop windowing, aggressive use of caching things in RAM, etc. but too many users were still purchasing the absolute cheapest thing they could find that would still boot.

Then you had all of the hardware issues caused by companies not bothering to write new drivers for old peripherals and the software issues from applications that just assumed you were running as root/admin. I didn't have any old scanners or printers or anything that needed driver updates and very few of my important applications weren't updated to work under the new UAC setup.

In many ways, I feel like most of Vista's problems came from 98SE and then XP being "good enough" for so long that a lot of companies and users weren't used to needing to choose software and hardware more carefully.

The biggest problem with Vista for most people was that it was sold on computers without enough RAM. We have a couple in our office (thankfully not used regularly) where it's 1 GB and the integrated GPU borrows a quarter of it for VRAM.

Windows Vista on 768 MB of memory is not a happy thing.

I can imagine it. I guess the experience is sort of like the one I had with a cheap Android smartphone, where the hardware was too weak to handle the OS itself (and if you tried to connect to the Internet, you basically had to pull the battery out because it went totally unresponsive).

I'm not sure why such things happen. Selling a product where the hardware is below minimum reasonable specs for the software it needs should be banned, or something.

I didn't have any problem with Vista either and I feel your pain, most people I speak with seems to love to hate Vista.

I also have a similar feeling when somebody tells me that Windows 8 was only good for touch devices (I enjoyed it in a HP 8710w and didn't miss the touchscreen at all)

My impression of Windows 8 (for most use cases at least) has always been that it's essentially Win7 with the beginnings of some "transitional" stuff tacked on. Still, they are mostly unobtrusive unless you never moved away from the old "drill down through menus" method of launching programs from the Start menu. Vista introduced a search function (to finally catch up with OSX's Spotlight) that made finding and opening programs or files much faster. Then 7 combined the quick launch bar and the taskbar to include pinning common apps to the bottom of your screen (more like the OSX dock). So between launching 90% of your programs from the taskbar and search&query for the rest, the Start menu was mostly legacy...

...but with Win8 I've learned just how many people never stopped doing things the old way. Does a full-screen Start make sense? Not particularly. But if you're just hitting the Windows key and typing the name of what you're looking for, you only see it for a few seconds. And while you're looking at the search results, you aren't really working actively on what's in your other running apps. Otherwise, you never really see it if you don't want to use it.

I'm glad 10 has shrunk Start back down because my minor complaint has always been that the full screen Start was just a little "jarring" but that's about it. If nothing else, it will make the old school Start menu die hards (read: the faculty I deal with) happier I guess.

> But if you're just hitting the Windows key and typing the name of what you're looking for, you only see it for a few seconds.

Which I'm probably not doing if I'm going from one program with a WIMP-optimized interface to another program with a WIMP-optimized interface; context-switching to keyboard-driven mode is a bigger UX loss than the start screen is there.

If you had a powerhouse computer it was fine. The midrange laptop I had at the time was not happy with it. It also broke compatibility with most of the games I had.

Make that two persons, I remember that it was quite ok on my machine.

Absolutely the only one issue I had with Vista was that system file copying went a little slow, and you could get 2x+ speedups by just using Total Commander instead. Apart from that, I had pretty much problem-free experience with Vista.

> Also, dat touchpad, nothing competes...

Trackpoint. Makes it very hard for me to switch from Thinkpads.

Also, I'm growing quite fond of having a touch screen and a pen for my laptop.

I've used MacBooks for years, but I still miss my Trackpoint. I cranked its speed and sensitivity up to max and trained myself to adapt to it. After that, I could do anything with just an imperceptible twitch with my fingers still on the home keys, thumb on one of three buttons. It's like the vim of mice. If I could get one as an option on my MBP, I'd do it in a second.

I can imagine, must be the opposite of actually starting to work with the Trackpoint. I tried, I really did, but I never got it to work for me.

It's funny you should say "Every time I update Windows, or even restart my windows laptop I hope that it'll still work afterwards. Updating has previously killed my dedicated graphics card, which turned out to be a driver issue. With Intel providing 2 nearly identical drivers one of which kills it."

That's funny because …

I just surrendered my MacBook Pro to an Apple Store for service yesterday because the external display mysteriously stopped working and the system won't fully boot. The on-site service tech was super competent but totally baffled and sent the machine away for Apple to replace components until things start working again.

And today Apple just released OS X 10.10.3 Supplemental Update which has description "The OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 Supplemental Update fixes a video driver issue that may prevent your Mac from starting up when running certain apps that capture video."

Hmmmmmmm.

If you have a late 2012 or early 2013 MBP you will know that your MBP will restart every time you played a video from youtube because they had a faulty GPU and refused to acknowledge it. There are problems with everything including the chromebooks but Apple's focus on quality is making Microsoft think twice and as a result is lifting all boats.

Anecdotal evidence. Here's mine:

I never ever had any issues with any of my 3 desktop PCs or with mit X200 in the last 5 years. With my recent Thinkpad X1 carbon I had to boot only once into safe mode after upgrading some Lenovo provided driver after almost 2 years of use.

Then again, upgrading has made the wifi on my mac mini go wonky, twice, and last week an upgrade made it stop recognizing the display's native resolution and downgraded it to 1024x768. Upgrades are always dangerous.

This is how every OSX/iOS developer feels when they update Xcode or an iOS SDK. And Apple forces you to update in most cases, so you can't avoid it. They are breaking stuff left and right.