Understanding Vista reliability mechanics

Mar 19, 2007 16:00 GMT  ·  By

Windows Vista gone wild is both a reality and an everyday occurrence. In fact, Windows Vista gone wild translates to aberrant behavior of the inline processes of the operating system. Windows Vista deals with troubled processes in its own way, and an insight on the way the operating system manages dying, hung or aberrant processes implies understanding the reliability mechanics behind the product.

"Reliability is what your customers experience while running your operating systems day to day. And from their perspective, an operating system is reliable if it doesn't crash or hang or blue screen, or at least not as often as to become noticeable. The interesting thing to note here is that the reliability of the operating system is something that real customers translate to much more than what we would consider the operating system. To them, the fact that let's say Adobe Acrobat crashes, says something about the reliability of the whole operating system. There are many cases when people blame Windows for things that don't have, at least from our point of view, much to do with the operating system code," revealed Cornel Lupu, a Windows core OS developing manager.

With the development of Windows Vista, Microsoft has focused extensively to ensure that the components of the operating system are reliable and resilient as far as failures as concerned. Windows Vista acts as a platform for all the applications running on top, and as such, the code quality is reflected in the reliability of the programs running on the operating system.

The fundamental modifications that have been introduced to the Windows Vista architecture are associated with the way the operating system handles dying or hung processes. In this context, Vista has improved not only the detection of aberrant processes but also the way they are managed. Just head over at Channel9 and watch a video interview on the reliability mechanics of Windows Vista.