2008-10-02 #1

Reliability and Performance Monitor

So Vista has it's own version of a guilty conscious where it clutches all of it's miserable failures. The Reliability and Performance Monitor lists application installs and removals, application failures, OS problems, and "Miscellaneous Failures" (most of which turn out to be "Disruptive Shutdown"s).

Oddly enough, I only discovered this thing while reading a spoof article discussing Microsoft's "XP upgrade to Vista".

It takes whatever bad news happens and trends it into an "Index", which is basically a made-up number between (I presume) 0 and 10.

My computer started out as a 10 when it was installed on 18 December 2007. It bottomed out on 21 August 2008 at an index of 4.18 and as of yesterday (1 October 2008) sits at an optimistic 8.82. It will be lower tomorrow, because the graph doesn't yet reflect a couple of application failures or one OS failure that I suffered today.

It's scientific, see? It's measured.

It is interesting in a way in that you can see for yourself the slow spiral into uselessness that the OS is taking. I'm now getting a crash every three or four days (or a "Disruptive Shutdown", which is effectively the same thing). When it was new, it would run for weeks at a time without a problem being registered.

It is clearly becoming time to bite the bullet and rebuild it, although I was hoping to make it to the first year anniversary of this installation.