OT & PSA: Vista crashing the last few weeks.

My Vista PC started crashing every evening a few weeks ago, & I've
finally figured out the cause. It's one of the NVidia services - either
Driver Helper Service, Performance Driver Service or Steroscopic 3D
Driver Service. Stopping all those & setting them to manual has solved
the problem.

Thought I'd mention it in case anyone else has the same problem, & for
Google fodder.

 

Why is anyone running Vista?

 

Why not? It does what I need it to do (on this PC), & has done so
reliably for years.

 

That's no excuse

 

As its an nvidia related issue and many Vista machines used chips that
were defective the problem may appear again and even get worse. Google "
nvidia defect" and see if the chip used in your machine is one that is
affected. Although most problems occur with laptops, poorly cooled
desktop graphics chips are also affected. I've had one laptop go down
and become unbootable and a desktop graphics card produce lined output
necessitating replacement, both chips were 8400 series.

 

Because they don't fancy paying for another copy of Vista rebadged as
Windows 7?

 

Heh. I couldn't *wait* to get Win7 on my HTPC simply cos it supports
multiple TV cards (which Vista didn't). But no need for that on this
PC, so I've never bothered upgrading it, even though the only cost is
my time.

 

<snort>

 

and not much time at that

 

A good couple of days at least to get everything setup again (on a
clean install). I'd call that quite a lot of time.

 

Bollocks, I'm still running XP Pro quite happily. I decided to give
Vistula a miss, as I'd heard so much bad about it, and even W7 will be
getting the swerve from me. My next OS set up will likely be Ubuntu/XP
mix, running on VMWare or something along those lines.

 

XP is functional. W7 is also ok.

 

Doesn't seem to match the problems I've been having, especially as it
only crashed when I hadn't been using it for a few hours. It's still ok
so I'm sure it was one of those services causing it.