What is a scientific explanation for that?

[Zolotoy]

I was trying to post a message on this forum using Windows central on Windows phone. While it was clearly showing my account I couldn't post messages. I uninstalled the app and installed it back. Still nothing. Then all time favorite medicine: restart. Then it worked. Isn't it a bit sad if you think about it?

 

[Chintan Gohel]

I was trying to post a message on this forum using Windows central on Windows phone. While it was clearly showing my account I couldn't post messages. I uninstalled the app and installed it back. Still nothing. Then all time favorite medicine: restart. Then it worked. Isn't it a bit sad if you think about it?

glitches happen to all, if it happened every time, then that would be an issue

 

[Bobvfr]

No just standard practice on almost any device with a chip in it, far better than when things ran on valves and you had to bash your TV to get it to work properly :smile:

 

[xandros9]

There's a reason "have you turned it off and on again?" is such a common question asked by service reps everywhere.

It's magic.

 

[Mad Cabbie]

I still get news items that show a black screen. Funny thing is, I can post comments on the story! D'oh. Mind you the WC app is many, many times better than it was!

 

[PGrey]

It's not sad, it's just a fact of programming, and bugs.
Say if I have a variable (value) in my code, and I set it to something, and am supposed to revert it, given certain circumstances (say to allow your unlock screen to work properly). Well, along comes another module, that I have a dependency on, and they quit reporting to me on all unlocks, so I get "stuck", never setting my value back, so my feature fails.
If the user reboots, I reset my value by the nature of the restart, and everything is back to normal. That is, until the certain circumstances "line up" again.
Dependency models are interesting. I used to work with a guy who did some of the space shuttle software (yeah, "that" shuttle) and they had to do endless "proofs" on their codepaths, in hopes of avoiding this.
Nowadays, we have all kinds of cool code tools, which catch a LOT of these issues, but not ALL, you can show, more or less mathematically, that it's not realistically possible to find all of the issues, in a normal product lifetime.

-pete

 

[a5cent]

^ Are you guys W10M apologists now? C'mon!

The OP is right. It's sad. It also shouldn't be accepted as normal. We need to look back no further than WP8 or WP7 (the most stable consumer OS of all time) to see that a mobile OS doesn't have to be this unstable and unreliable. Everyone here knows it's possible to do better. Just because we can get accustomed to mediocrity doesn't mean we should just accept it as a given.

I can't remember the last time I had a BSOD on a Windows or Linux computer, or had to reboot my PC to fix a problem. It must have been over 15 years ago. I never had the OS crash on WP7 or WP8. I experienced two or three app crashes on WP8, but I consider that acceptable. I don't expect the same level of professionalism from app developers that I do from OS developers.

However, on W10M I experience a OS crash about once every three weeks. I must also reboot my device about once a week to deal with instability issues (similar to what the OP is reporting here). Apps crashing is pretty much a regular part of using W10M now. I suspect things are better on the L950/XL, but that's simply not good enough overall.

I realize that the OP has an issue with an app rather than the OS, but if a reboot "fixes" the problem, then the OS is at least somehow involved in that problem (otherwise relaunching the app would be enough, which it should be). That is sad.

 

[PGrey]

I don't know, you and I have two different Win 10 desktop (non-mobile experiences).
I have to reboot my desktop (granted, it's got a LOT of software, dev. environment, office and tools, various odd utilities, a fancy graphics card, etc) at least once a week, maybe two if I'm very lucky. The system itself either crashes, or just gets unusable. Occasionally I can manage to nuke enough stuff via taskmanager, but often a reboot is the only real fix.
I also have to restart Edge, quite frequently (this is part of the OS in Win10, if you ask me anyway), because it becomes unusable, or because it crashes too. Often it fails to resume my sessions/tabs as well (after crashing), so much so that I've started using Chrome more often, which I never thought I would do.

I have a laptop (a very current Lenovo), with a fresh install, where Edge crashes fully, all the time, and I've debugged it to an error that's part of a longstanding bug in the MS database, which seems to be going nowhere, for now anyway. That's a fairly clean install, and sometimes I have to restart Edge several times, just to look for something, it crashes so much.

I wouldn't say my W10m experience is "unstable" (most builds) but I certainly wouldn't call it much more stable than my Win10 desktop one, if at all.

The same motherboard/video (with two less sticks of the same DDR4) ran Win7, for weeks on end, sometimes months, without issue.

I like Win10 a LOT, wouldn't choose to go back to Win7 at all, but I think it's still "maturing" and will continue to do so, for some time, before it's truly stable.
I'm not alone in this summation either, try reading some reviews, even very recent ones...

I want your Win10 desktop experience! ;-]

-pete

 

[a5cent]

I wouldn't say my W10m experience is "unstable" (most builds) but I certainly wouldn't call it much more stable than my Win10 desktop one, if at all.

You seem to be saying that your W10 experience is also pretty crappy, so it's tolerable that W10M isn't much better. Fine. I'm not willing to accept that level of mediocrity.

I'd never use W10 the way you do for precisely that reason. I'd never install the development environments for multiple software projects onto a single PC (when some use competing technology, some use different versions of the same software, some use dongles or some ship with DRM technology, etc). We've known for twenty years that Windows is incapable of cleanly isolating software installations from one another or cleanly uninstalling software packages, which is precisely why I use a separate VM for every software development project (although some are Linux based). Otherwise I boot to one of two different Windows VHDX files, one for gaming and one for productivity, the later of which I regularly replace with a fresh copy of the VHDX every few months.

With this setup I'm never required to setup any development environment for any project more than once, no matter how often I update hardware, and by copying the fresh VHDX I can achieve the equivalent of:
- a Windows clean install
- installing the five big software packages I regularly use
- configuring everything exactly the way I like it
in under 60 seconds. In addition to that I also have a set of about 50 tools/utilities on a separate partition, but those are all portable and don't require installation. I can't remember the last time I had a stability issue of any kind. No BSODs. No reboots.

I'm willing to do this sort of thing for a professionally used PC and the projects I earn money with. I'm not willing to do this for a phone. It's very reasonable to judge both using a different set of standards. A smartphone is an appliance. A PC is not. I therefore expect a phone to be 100% reliable without having to jump through hoops or having to invest a lot of time. That currently doesn't apply to W10M.

IMHO WP7 and WP8 should have more than adequately proven to us that we can realistically expect a far more stable, reliable and consistent experience than W10M can currently deliver, maybe not on day one, but certainly within a few weeks of launch. Do we really need to make excuses for what we're seeing now?

 

[Chintan Gohel]

Pgrey and A5cent - are your experiences the norm or unusual? I haven't seen my surface crashing ever while my older pc has crashed once only since upgrading last year. My surface can freeze now and then but that is because if some software or downloads

 

[a5cent]

Pgrey and A5cent - are your experiences the norm or unusual? I haven't seen my surface crashing ever while my older pc has crashed once only since upgrading last year. My surface can freeze now and then but that is because if some software or downloads

Yes, I'd say my experiences reflect what people generally experience with W10M (the majority of people with older devices) and W10 (because most Windows installations are trivial compared to what PGrey does and simple installations are typically very stable).

BTW. No matter how screwed up any piece of software is, it's the OS'es job to protect your system from instabilities caused by "rogue" software. If your Surface freezes due to normal software/apps (not drivers), then W10 isn't doing what it should be doing, or at least it's not doing it well enough.

 

[PGrey]

Pgrey and A5cent - are your experiences the norm or unusual? I haven't seen my surface crashing ever while my older pc has crashed once only since upgrading last year. My surface can freeze now and then but that is because if some software or downloads

I'd say my experience is possibly outside the norm (I haven't checked recent telemetry data), and often my display driver crashes (AMD has some issues still with the W10 drivers), but I don't feel like I'm an outlier, particularly when I read forums and reviews.
Win10 is stable "enough" for me, maybe not as stable as I'd like, or as most would like. Loading VM type setups is something I've considered, like a5cent, but for the near-term, I'm good with my desktop and other installs, as-is, stability issues are not serious enough to cause me to abandon my current methods.

I only agree partially on the "appliance" status of a phone. To me, phones have taken a departure from being "just an appliance", when we started expecting them to do EVERYTHING a PC can do (and more, in many cases). To me, this just implies a small mobile PC, that also functions as a phone, but that's a philosophical standpoint, obviously.
Was Win7 (and maybe Win8, certainly WinPhone8) more stable, yes, absolutely! Was it less secure, and less capable, also a yes. Would I go back to it, for the stability, nope. I might have answered this differently, right around pre-RTM, and shortly after, but I think things have gotten a lot better, particularly in the past 6 months.

I've done OS work (a lot of it), it's very hard, particularly when you've got thousands of people in a larger group, with dozens of branches, all trying to get features and fixes in, and re-integrated into one of many sub or main branches, merges of all sorts can be very tricky in this regard.
Should we hold the OS to a VERY high regard, yes, I agree 100%. Is it infallible, no, not by any means. If we wanted this type of OS, we would have to wait longer for releases/features, and that's just not how the market is going right now...

IME, 95%+ of these "freezes" we see are all driver-related, and more often than not, they're third-party submitted, even if they shipped in-box (or maybe they were updated post-ship). I worked on stability for these drivers, we did things like discover data and other interfaces, hammer them, put them through various state transitions, run IOCtL probes, and mix things up 27 different ways. We found so many bugs that I lost count, but almost 100% of the driver stacks that were built-in were fixed, and some 3rd party ones were delayed, just the nature of shipping the OS, again.
It's tricky, since MS has a lot of trusted partners, they can't point fingers, about telemetry data, but must generally just "eat" the comments about instability, even though they created all types of mechanism to allow clean exception and other error handling, which are then ignored, or partially implemented, by some third-parties.
Be-it-as-it-may, this is where greater Windows ecosystem sits today.

 

[Chintan Gohel]

Yes, I'd say my experiences reflect what people generally experience with W10M (the majority of people with older devices) and W10 (because most Windows installations are trivial compared to what PGrey does and simple installations are typically very stable).

BTW. No matter how screwed up any piece of software is, it's the OS'es job to protect your system from instabilities caused by "rogue" software. If your Surface freezes due to normal software/apps (not drivers), then W10 isn't doing what it should be doing, or at least it's not doing it well enough.

Actually, the RAM is limiting I guess. On no use case, RAM usage is usually at 2GB out of 4 but with a browser open, idm running, maybe wmp and bluestacks, the surface can struggle on occasion, maybe 3% of the time? I actually suspect bluestacks to be the main culprit

 

[Chintan Gohel]

PGrey, insightful post above. I agree with you on many points. Sometimes expectations run too high for what a phone can and should do but sometimes we set the bar low ourselves and have to deal with crashes and freezes. The trade-off is about getting new features rapidly but fixes needed or getting features much later but very stable

 

[a5cent]

I only agree partially on the "appliance" status of a phone. To me, phones have taken a departure from being "just an appliance", when we started expecting them to do EVERYTHING a PC can do (and more, in many cases). To me, this just implies a small mobile PC, that also functions as a phone, but that's a philosophical standpoint, obviously.

I'm not so sure that's just a philosophical standpoint. I guess it ultimately depends on where MS decides to take WinRT.

I'd say the entire WinRT environment is pushing Windows towards being an appliance. In comparison to the good ol' days of Win32, MS now exerts much more control over how software is installed and uninstalled. MS is also a lot stricter in terms of what apps can and can't do. Even the security model built into WinRT is secure by design, rather than requiring tacked on software to monitor security.

A Synology NAS is clearly an appliance. If MS had a W10 desktop OS that supported only WinRT (pretty much W10M), I think that would be very comparable to a Synology NAS, and I'd also consider it an appliance. That's also how I see W10M. It's very controlled, locked down, and the vectors of attack are extremely limited compared to Win32. Just like an appliance...

 

[PGrey]

Agreed, it does depend on technical direction for WinRT. I think that eventually, we'll just have "Windows", and maybe there will be a mobile subset still, maybe not. It's long been a target for MS, at least some teams anyway, there are various thoughts on where this will go, longer term.

Android has already taken a similar tack here, although obviously their desktop presence isn't the same.

I sort of think of my QNAP as a LOT more than an appliance, it handles many mini-domain tasks for our household network, so that I don't have to have server running, in order to have a "mostly domain" security model (user/domain permissions and such). I can install various apps, and clearly I could totally de-stabilize it, by choosing some apps, in particular side-loading them.
While I don't have the basic QNAP, I don't have a high-end one either (more like mid-low-end), I remember looking at the Synology units when I got a new one a couple of years back, don't recall exactly why I decided QNAP was still the direction, for me though.

If we want things like DTTW (I'm almost positive this has de-stabilized the firmware a bit), and want them sooner, rather than waiting for them to "bake" in the slow ring, for at least 6-12 months, maybe more, than in my mind, we have to accept some stability issues.
If we truly want "appliance" levels of stability, changes and fixes must be surgical, and more than likely older devices will get sunset-ed much sooner.

I don't know, maybe it's not purely philosophical, but I think it's at least partly so, given the fact it's all a big "horse trade", as we used to call it, when we were fighting for features, but chasing stability, all in one release...

Edit: Excellent discussion, BTW.
Chintan always seems to know the way to express things minimally, yet keep us from beating on each other ;-]
I used to manage teams of varying sorts, have had reasonable success at it, and it's definitely similar, you're always looking at what kind of expectations need to be set, what works for everyone, etc. Excellent job as an ambassador!
While I've been told I'm a good (sometimes excellent) manager, I don't see myself as being an awesome forum moderator, I tend to think of it as being a bit too "willy nilly" and like the somewhat de-structred approach here ;-]

-pete

 

[Chintan Gohel]

Edit: Excellent discussion, BTW.
Chintan always seems to know the way to express things minimally, yet keep us from beating on each other ;-]
I used to manage teams of varying sorts, have had reasonable success at it, and it's definitely similar, you're always looking at what kind of expectations need to be set, what works for everyone, etc. Excellent job as an ambassador!
While I've been told I'm a good (sometimes excellent) manager, I don't see myself as being an awesome forum moderator, I tend to think of it as being a bit too "willy nilly" and like the somewhat de-structred approach here ;-]

-pete

Thank you, that means a lot. And I'm sitting here thinking what am I writing :grincry:

Agreed, it does depend on technical direction for WinRT. I think that eventually, we'll just have "Windows", and maybe there will be a mobile subset still, maybe not. It's long been a target for MS, at least some teams anyway, there are various thoughts on where this will go, longer term.

Android has already taken a similar tack here, although obviously their desktop presence isn't the same.

I sort of think of my QNAP as a LOT more than an appliance, it handles many mini-domain tasks for our household network, so that I don't have to have server running, in order to have a "mostly domain" security model (user/domain permissions and such). I can install various apps, and clearly I could totally de-stabilize it, by choosing some apps, in particular side-loading them.
While I don't have the basic QNAP, I don't have a high-end one either (more like mid-low-end), I remember looking at the Synology units when I got a new one a couple of years back, don't recall exactly why I decided QNAP was still the direction, for me though.

If we want things like DTTW (I'm almost positive this has de-stabilized the firmware a bit), and want them sooner, rather than waiting for them to "bake" in the slow ring, for at least 6-12 months, maybe more, than in my mind, we have to accept some stability issues.
If we truly want "appliance" levels of stability, changes and fixes must be surgical, and more than likely older devices will get sunset-ed much sooner.

I don't know, maybe it's not purely philosophical, but I think it's at least partly so, given the fact it's all a big "horse trade", as we used to call it, when we were fighting for features, but chasing stability, all in one release...


-pete

this thread is fast moving in another direction altogether - one that I'm not familiar with though interesting to read nevertheless

 

[Prometheus2021]

This happened to me earlier this week lol.

Posted from Windows Central for Windows 10