Vista Stability Improvements

The second thing that people always ask about a forthcoming version of Windows is, "Will it crash less often? Microsoft has had nearly a quarter of a century to get Windows right, so why can't they produce a glitch-free operating system?" I have to break the news to my frustrated interlocutors that what they seek is almost certainly impossible. Windows is just too big and complex, and the number of software permutations and hardware combinations is just too huge to ensure complete system stability in all setups.

That doesn't mean that Microsoft isn't at least trying to make Windows more stable. Here's what they've done in Vista:

• I/O cancellation Windows often fails because some program has crashed and brought the OS down with it. The usual cause of this is that a program has made an input/output (I/O) request to a service, resource, or another program, but that process is unavailable; this results in a stuck program that requires a reboot to recover. To prevent this, Vista implements an improved version of a technology called I/O cancellation, which can detect when a program is stuck waiting for an I/O request and then cancel that request to help the program recover from the problem.

• Reliability monitor This new feature keeps track of the overall stability of your system, as well as reliability events, which are either changes to your system that could affect stability or occurrences that might indicate instability. Reliability events include Windows updates, software installs and uninstalls, device driver installs, updates, rollbacks and uninstalls, device driver problems, and Windows failures. Reliability monitors graphs these changes and a measure of system stability over time so that you can graphically see whether any changes affected system stability.

• Service recovery Many Windows services are mission-critical, and if they fail, it almost always means that the only way to recover your system is to shut down and restart your computer. With Windows Vista, however, every service has a recovery policy that enables Vista not only to restart the service, but also to reset any other service or process that is dependent on the failed service.

• Startup Repair Tool Troubleshooting startup problems is not for the faint-of-heart, but you may never have to perform this onerous core again, thanks to Vista's new Startup Repair Tool (SRT), which is designed to fix many common startup problems automatically. When a startup failure occurs, Vista starts the SRT immediately. The program then analyzes the startup logs and performs a series of diagnostic tests to determine the cause of the startup failure.

• New diagnostic tools Windows Vista is loaded with new and improved diagnostic tools. These include Disk Diagnostics (which monitors the Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, or SMART, data generated by most modern hard disks), Windows Memory Diagnostics (which works with Microsoft Online Crash Analysis to determine whether program crashes are caused by defective physical memory), Memory Leak Diagnosis (which looks for and fixes programs that are using up increasing amounts of memory), Windows Resource Exhaustion Detection and Resolution (RADAR, which monitors virtual memory and issues a warning when resources run low, and also identifies which programs or processes are using the most virtual memory and includes a list of these resource hogs as part of the warning), Network Diagnostics (which analyzes all aspects of the network connection and then either fixes the problem or gives the user simple instructions for resolving the situation), and the Windows Diagnostic Console (which enables you to monitor performance metrics).