A few dozen.

I won't tell you guys how to troubleshoot your crashing Vista machine, but the OS isn't at all the first place I'd look to find the problem.

Most Vista boxes don't ever crash. Mine certainly don't. On the server side of things (Windows Server versus RHEL, say) my impression is that Microsoft outcompetes Redhat on stability. Just not on cost.

You should have checked my profile I guess before you made your claim ;)

Anyway, a few dozen is pretty good, more than most people have.

I figured you were owner of a large outfit that runs thousands of machines.

That's when you start to get interesting statistics.

Hmm. I just have a lot of trouble believing that you run lots and lots of machines and yet have never seen a kernel crash.

Well, maybe we're just lucky but I don't think that is it.

We strip the kernels down to the minimum we need on machine installation and we always try to find out what caused a problem.

On top of that a buddy of mine wrote a piece of software he calls 'flame', which is used to manage 300 machines.

Sure, occasionally one of those will go down. But post-mortem analysis will invariably point to some piece of hardware that broke. Either a cpu, a memory chip or a drive hanging on by a hair. I think the trick to managing large numbers of servers and not being in reboot hell all the time is to find a recipe and to stick to it, and good quality monitoring tools to give you an early warning.

And if you are running on cheap non-ecc motherboards for servers that really is asking for it.

I like to sleep well :)

The last crash that I remember was in February this year, a faulty memory chip that had been registering complaints for a while in the mcelog (but due to a human error we missed it). We had just upgraded a machine that was already in production and we did not burn in the machine out of service. Stupid mistake...

We burn in our new machines religiously and we only use top quality hardware. Still, during the burn-in phase we have a good 10% hardware failures.

But once the machines pass burn in - and we really give them hell - they perform pretty good.

Since we're in anecdotal territory anyway, once during the burn in testing of an ethernet switch over the weekend we came back to the office on monday morning to find the test frozen.

The switch was no longer passing data in or out. A reboot would not revive it.

We opened it up to find a crack running straight down the middle of one of the chips... so much for that particular brand of router :)

Where the heck would you look for troubleshooting a Vista machine if not the OS? Are you saying it's probably a hardware problem, or are you one of these people that thinks when an application takes down the whole system it's not a sign there's anything wrong with the OS?

I'd look at Hardware -> Drivers -> Anti-Virus -> Malware.

In that order. Then I'd start poking around for OS issues.

Other than hardware, none of those problem sources is any excuse for the whole system to crash -- but people still behave like they are on MS Windows.