I've been using Vista for a while now, both at work and at home.  Up until now, I've mostly felt that it's just a slight upgrade from Windows XP.  I understand all of the work that went into the underpinnings and such and from a developer perspective I can certainly appreciate these.

From a regular user's perspective, I'm concerned with features and of the features that I've used, the system-wide search feature is the only one I've found useful on a day-to-day basis.  The rest of the changes are minor or cosmetic to me.

That is, until my wife's computer started crashing.

It wasn't a large crash.  Something called "COM Surrogate" was crashing at seemingly random times.  I had a pretty good idea at how to reproduce the problem, but no way of knowing what the original cause was.

I opened up the "Reliability Monitor" program - a new feature in Windows Vista I'd not really investigated heavily.  This feature turned out to be exactly what I needed and allowed me to diagnose the problem immediately.  Here's what Reliability Monitor showed me:

reliability

These crashes appear to have started on July 9th (indicated by the red X's).  The black line is a "score" of the system stability (higher is better).  Notice that the black line drops after a certain point (bad).  Prior to that the system had been rock-solid.

The day before these crashes started, a new program was installed - Nero Burning ROM version 7.02, suggesting it might be the cause.  I can see this directly from this screen, without going to another tool to find out what changed on that date or what version was installed.

A quick look on Nero's website confirmed incompatibilities between Vista and this version of Nero that effected the operating system's ability to generate thumbnails for video files.

I updated Nero and all is well.

Data like this is invaluable to solving stability issues and Microsoft has found a way to present the information so that even an idiot like myself can come up with a reasonable hypothesis as to the cause of a problem.  This is truly a great tool and the first compelling reason I've seen to upgrade my mother's PC to Vista.

1 Comment(s) 15:22 - Aug 06, 2007

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Celestino Garza :

I haven't used this tool but, I have the same "COM surrogate" issue.  I'll try this tool.

It is, however, a little too humble of you to call yourself an "idiot" when it comes to computers.  For a programmer, your OS skills are above par.  Compared to an average user, I'd be surprised if you weren't in the top 1%.  

I don't mean to flatter you but, the average user is not likely to use this or any other trouble shooting tool on their PC.  This is for the slightly smarter cousin or friend who is going to use remote assistance to help out the average user and explain what remote assistance is in the process.  Meanwhile, the average user is amazed at the fact that his or her mouse is moving around as if by virtue of magic.

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