Windows Phone 8 reboot woe causes outpouring of forum misery
Early adopters of Windows Phone 8 hardware are complaining that it reboots at random, up to several times a day, and that they're not being offered any prospect of a quick fix. The complaints relate specifically to the HTC 8X and, to a lesser extent, Nokia's Lumia 920, with Windows Phone 8 locking up or randomly rebooting on …
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Re: duh
> If Windows was so bad then industry would grind to a halt. Given the 90% plus marketshare of Windows on the desktop...
"Industry" does not run on desktop computers. Those parts that do, are generally not real-time processes. Windows does not have "90% plus" marketshare on servers, where stability really matters.
> Many organisations have tried to move their office desktops to Linux and have ended up going back to Windows.
And many organisations have successfully made the transition from Windows, and not looked back. But those organisations don't get paid by Microsoft to make press releases about it.
Re: duh
@AC
I feel you might have overlooked the power of having a critical mass of users... Facebook users don't like way it treats them, but can't change to something more respectful because their friends are on it. eBay is under no pressure to improve itself, since people selling things will want to use the auction site with the most users. And we have all heard of how businesses locked themselves into using Windows because of applications that require IE 5.
Many small businesses use Sage products because the Inland Revenue likes it, and so 3rd party software vendors make their sector-specific software integrate with it... and Sage isn't available for Linux.
Businesses can't jump horses in mid-stream, even if a demonstrably better horse presents itself.
Re: duh
Which is why it says 90% share on the desktop duh!
Servers are not what people use directly, they are use indirectly.
Re: duh
Like I said, many have tried to change and have gone back. There are plenty of case studies around on the web.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/German-Council-Slams-OpenOffice-Wants-Microsoft-Office-Back-307741.shtml
Re: duh
In the above example, I hope they filed requests for the missing functionality, if you don't ask you don't get and unlike a product like Microsoft Office you pay your money and that earns you the right to act like a prima donna when it lacks the required support.
Apache owned OpenOffice only gets better with a flow of feedback from the people using it and finding problems with it, identifying things that can be improved and contribution from developers who are charitable enough to contribute their time to the code base to provide a realistic alternative to Microsoft Office.
Some businesses make the mistake of seeing it as a Microsoft Office substitute with very attractive price tag, but fail to see that if they aren't willing to get involved by feeding back to the community then they might as well stick with the one that comes in a box.
Re: duh
"have gone back", eh? Why not follow this up with examples for which this is true? The decision on whether Freiburg are going to go back to MS Office or not is in fact to be made tomorrow (in German: http://www.heise.de/open/meldung/Freiburg-Widerspruch-gegen-die-Office-Migration-1751357.html).
As has been pointed out, other towns such as Munich, Jena and Leipzig and others have happily converted to OpenOffice and are overall content with the change with no intentions of moving back. There is also the issue that they sit on old versions OpenOffice instead of regularly updating which according to the OSB Alliance (in German: open letter in response to the suggestion of a move back to MS Office: http://www.osb-alliance.de/themen-aktuelles/detailansicht/artikel/beschlussvorlage-g12-223-anwendung-von-offenen-standards-und-quelloffener-software-open-source/) would alleviate many of their issues. They make a lot of other I find good points and we'll see how it plays out.
Re: duh
True that. The UNIX/Linux evangelical movement don't like it and pretend it doesn't happen, but you get just as much migration back to Windows as away from.
As in all these things, if you want the truth, follow the money. I've not seen Microsoft filling for bankruptcy lately.
Re: duh
If Windows was so bad then industry would grind to a halt.
A recent "Time and Motion" study where I work showed between 30 minutes and 2 hours per employee, per day lost to the inefficiencies, instabilities and inconsistencies of Windows. That's why we've banned it. We also don't allow Mac, due to its basic incompatibility with everything else... There is only one sane option!
If Windows was so bad then industry would grind to a halt.
Windows being bad literally is an industry. If it were fixed tens of millions of people would find themselves out of a job.
The parasite ecosystem is the most salient feature of Windows, and its biggest reason for existance.
Sad to have to soil the once proud word 'industry' that way.
Re: duh
Many organizations have tried to move their office servers to Windows and have ended up going back to Linux.
WP7
WP7 had the same problem - my Lumia 900 used to do the same thing but then it just stopped doing it - so it was probably fixed in one of the 2 software updates I have received.
Re: WP7
WP7 didn't have the same problem - my HTC Trophy never did that and it's about 20 months old. Yours may have - and that sucks - but that doesn't mean the OS somehow was the problem. It wasn't. Probably a hardware issue where accessing an infrequently-used component (say, GPS?) is causing a serious error.
Re: WP7
First, I have GPS disabled on my phone. Second if it was a hardware thing it would have continued, it didn't - it stopped doing it at some point after I installed an update, which would suggest it was a WP7 thing not a hardware thing.
Just because your Trophy never had the problem doesn't mean it wasn't an OS issue - just as some of the WP8 devices are not suffering from the issues discussed in this article.
Thanks anyway.
Reboot culture
Is it just me that detests the "reboot culture" of tech support?
Sure, it fixes the immediate problem (i.e. my computer is inaccessible) but it doesn't solve the actual problem or its causes in any, shape or form.
I've heard it for every problem known to man and if a reboot gets you to a working machine then it's "problem solved" according to the support lines and off you're supposed to trundle. ISP's are particularly mad on this and I have just moved to a leased line at work because the line we have CAN be fixed by rebooting the modem - but we have to reboot it 10-20 times a day. And now its creeping into daily life when your phone needs rebooting, or your media player, or you Blu-Ray player, or your games console or even your car (OBD etc.). Fix-by-rebooting is like saying "Well, if you start your car and it doesn't show the same 'I have no brakes' problem that you just experienced at 70mph on the motorway when it restarts, then your problem is solved".
And not just that, but incessant reboots to do trivial tasks are the bane of my life. I can't count the number of forced reboots I have to endure throughout the working day for NO GOOD REASON.
When tech support anywhere tell me to reboot, I pause for a minute, say "Yep, done that" and then hope they'll get on with actually solving the damn problem.
Re: Reboot culture
You are not alone - but when the culture is really 'reinstall the OS every six months' then 'reboot to fix' is trivial in comparison. I fear we are doomed.
Re: Reboot culture
That's a windows-only culture - reinstall when the thing slows down after a few months. reboot incessantly.
Re: Reboot culture
Yes, because Linux never slows down if you fill it up with cruft.
If you fill up a Windows OS or a Linux OS with a whole load of old crap, that isn't needed they both slow down. If you've got a standard Windows build and you need to re-install it every few months, you're doing something wrong. Personally I don't need to re-install either every few months, I've got Windows VMs which have been running for seven or eight years on the same build. I would note that when I do upgrade, it's form a full re-install on either Linux or Windows because no-matter what anyone says an upgrade install of an OS rarely works properly. As an aside, many linux releases have a much quicker release cycle than Windows, so pretty much all of my Linux VMs are younger than my Windows VMs.
Re: Reboot culture
My last XP image went through 4 computers, and nearly 8 years of constant use (so I still had the drivers from the very first computer still present on the disk when I broke the last laptop this year!). Hell, it was on the exact same hard drive for most of that time.
I suspect that with virtualisation etc. my current OS setup will actually last longer without any kind of reinstall (I already virtualise my copy of Windows 8 Pro because my workplace are looking at moving to it as their primary desktops and I'll need to support it - the machine actually doing the virtualisation DOES NOT run on that heap of junk).
But saying that, I still have Linux machines with a direct archaeology back to Slackware 3.1 and kernel 2.0.38, if I want to get pedantic (1996, I think).
People seem to forget that hardware comes and goes but your software SHOULDN'T. Upgrades, yes, clean-ups, yes, even complete hardware replacements - but you shouldn't be formatting your drive unless something incredibly drastic has gone wrong and you have no suitable backups.
Now, in terms of professional setups, I am a bit the opposite and will happily re-image a PC from a known-working image or use a clean image for a new base on a new model. But that's because I want those machines *pristine* and to eliminate the current disk data as a source of the trouble. That's totally different to a home user.
And I make a point of correcting anyone who pulls out the "computers get slower the more you use them" line. It's a load of tosh. It's like saying a car gets slower if you don't put any oil in it... of course it does! But if you did a little bit of maintenance every now and again on probably THE most expensive electrical appliance in your house, then it can go at the same speed it always has until the hardware itself dies.
Re: Reboot culture - windows rot
AC - you make a noob error (or are astroturfing) - "Yes, because Linux never slows down if you fill it up with cruft" - WRONG.
Actually with Linux, it does not accumulate cruft in a measurable way, unlike windows. The reason windows slows down is that the OS mixes OS data with user data, OS processes with user processes and so on, so that applications hammer the system in ways that cannot be undone. For example, applications affect the registry and registry bloat bogs down the entire windows system.
With Linux, there is a sharp separation between apps and the OS, and there is no registry (except that a fake one that some idiot tried to foist on gnome and no one uses - note that gnome isn't Linux).
Now if you install services you may screw things up but no one sees this with Linux, the system is as fast after two years as the day it was installed - I have never known Linux to slow down.
However with windows soffware seems to get its sticky fingers into all kinds of windows services and other horrors, the registry fattens up, and that's before security holes expose users (noobs mostly) to even more performance degradation via bot net agents and so on.
For most users, windows rots and becomes unusable pretty quickly, I see this all the time. Yet if newbies are on Linux, it stays secure and stays fast, because linux is a better architected, better designed system - based on UNIX. The same thing can be said of OSX and other Unix derivatives.
Re: Reboot culture - windows rot
To reply to myself, there is also anecdotal evidence that all those windows updates can degrade performance also. Another source of windows rot.
Re: Reboot culture
Having spent more time than I care to mention on 3rd line support, there is a reason for the reboot culture - it tends to "fix" the incident.
If you are genuinely rebooting on the scale you suggest, then your support *should* have been altering an incident to a problem (ITIL standard), since you have an underlying issue that needs to be resolved.
As for other comments about continuous reboots/rebuilds. I rebuilt my PC 2 weeks ago, for the first time since November 2007. It had been running Vista 64bit for all that time, mostly on long stints without rebooting - what had been changed over that time period was the motherboard (wanted a PCI-e 2.1 mobo), the CPU cooler (went from air to water cooled), the soundcard (went from onboard to Asus D2X), the memory (went from 4GB to 8GB), the graphics card (X1950 to 8800GT to 8800GTS to HD5770), the PSU (replaced with a modular supply) and the case (needed more drive bays). All of that done with the same OS install and it was running at almost the same speed at the end as the start (boot-up wise).
To all those who think you need to rebuild every 6 months, learn to build it properly in the first place and that becomes unnecessary.
Re: Reboot culture
@EvilGav and others - when I say reinstall every 6 months, I refer to the average user - Mums, teenagers etc, not so much geeks that have learned to avoid mistakes normal people make. These mistakes generally can occur on Windows to a far higher degree than other operating systems such as OSX, Android, Linux etc. Windows is insecure - that's why you see botnets controlling zombie windows machines. - Don't confuse yourselves with an average family user, who get burned again and again.
Re: Reboot culture
Ha ha, this morning I had to reboot after plugging my mouse into a different USB socket. On Windows 7. I kid you not.
Re: Reboot culture
"Yes, because Linux never slows down if you fill it up with cruft."
Being a monolithic kernel, this statement is 100% accurate.
Re: Reboot culture
Ha ha, this morning I had to reboot after plugging my mouse into a different USB socket. On Windows 7. I kid you not.
I've seen that on Windows 7 as well.
It's right up there with the NT4 (or was it Win98?) message:
Keyboard not found. Hit any key continue
Re: probably THE most expensive electrical appliance in your house
Why would servicing my SMEG fridge stop my laptop from slowing?
Hell, I probably paid more for my washing machine and dishwasher than my laptop.
Re: Reboot culture
One my favorites was when NT4 would run out of disk space: (paraphrased)
"No space available. Please delete some files".
You could at least use the command line to delete the file and free up some space but Good Lord that was a dumb error message.
Re: Reboot culture - windows rot
With Linux [...] there is no registry (except that a fake one that some idiot tried to foist on gnome and no one uses
Upvote for your post. Spot on in almost every respect. Except even though I initially thought the registry was a crap idea in Gnome, at least it's restricted to just Gnome, and it's per-user rather than being system-wide. Even though I do still think it is a bit of a mess and is over-used within Gnome, it does have one very useful feature: it means that if I ssh -X into a system and set up a gconf process then any gnome apps that I run there will have a method of permanently storing configuration changes. At least that makes it marginally easier than each app having its own incompatible config file and miles better than the alternative using xrdb (and no need for apps to restart before settings take effect)
Re: Reboot culture
Who is this General Failure, and why is he reading my C: drive?
Re: Reboot culture @ Wensleydale Cheese
"It's right up there with the NT4 (or was it Win98?) message:
Keyboard not found. Hit any key continue"
That's actually a BIOS/POST error, isn't it?
Re: Reboot culture
""No space available. Please delete some files".
You could at least use the command line to delete the file and free up some space but Good Lord that was a dumb error message."
Why?
Re: Reboot culture
Reboot culture lays at Microsoft's door. It's so pervasive now that I regularly come across the attitude that non windows servers need to be regularly rebooted, like linux boxes. That simply isn't the case!
I must also point out that there are some very dodgy statistics being quoted by some above. 90% of computers do not run Windows. Admittedly Linux hasn't really taken off as a desktop OS but server side it has a massive share of the market and that is continuing to grow. When you introduce IOS and Android you can clearly see why Windows 8 is so make or break for Microsoft, their market share continues to be eroded.
I don't want to see the end of Microsoft, but learning a little humility would do them a lot of good.
Re: Reboot culture
"when I say reinstall every 6 months, I refer to the average user - Mums, teenagers etc, not so much geeks that have learned to avoid mistakes normal people make."
This is exactly what other commentards have pointed out: the demographic for Linux users is not the same as Windows, so you can hardly expect the same type of problems.
I'm typing this on an XP Professional system I built in 2002, it's still as sprightly as always; and I can't remember when I last had an unscheduled reboot on it. I've had similar experience (so far) on my Windows 7 Professional laptop.
Don't get me wrong, I think Linux is a great O/S (I have an old netbook running Ubuntu), especially for servers; but most O/S problems are a result of users doing things that they shouldn't (e.g. installing software from dubious sites), so locking the admin features away is advisable for all O/S, but especially Windows.
On the WinMo reboot, I've had quite a few unscheduled reboots on my Galaxy Nexus (maybe scheduled by Google perhaps, but not me) resulting in missed calls etc. so I can sympathise.
Re: Reboot culture
Yah, That "Keyboard nor found" error floors me every time, but unfortunately, it's a BIOS error, not a Windows one. It goes back to IBM PS/2 systems, I think, but may have been in the original IBM PC as well (I don't have anything that old to test on, I threw my wife's 5150 away when she got a Tosh T1000 laptop for £25 about 10 years ago).
My youngest son has a different problem. He has a Microsoft Sidewinder mouse plugged into a Windows 7 system, and after about an hour, it stops working. Unplug and replug, and it works again. Plug it into ANY other OS (not tried Windows 8, admittedly), and it works perfectly for ever. And this appears to be a well reported problem. Still, it's a bit off topic.
My iPhone reboots all the time when launching apps or switching apps. After 5 years you would think they would be fixed by now.
your iphone
is broken, mate. Or (jail)broken.Nobody else's does that. Sorry.
After 5 years you would think they would be fixed by now
Most of us know that warranty expires after 2 years - you should have brought it in earlier..
Used to have an SE 910i like that
Would reset itself at bizarre random times.
Like once in the middle of a call when I was telling them that despite the snow and ice I was ok and hadn't crashed the car (using handsfree of course!) - then having to wait around 10 minutes before I could call them back to complete the conversation!
Called Sony Ericsson support who went - oh it does that! It's because it's had an update. Really - they updated it a lot then - reset almost twice a day at one stage...
How much worse can it get?
This is proof that the only operating system that works on both PC's and phones is - Linux. (There are Linux phones and also, more commonly of course, Android phones (Linux kernel).
Windows is such a bloated mess, written to designs by dysfunctional committies (Yes Cutler wrote the kernel based loosely on VMS but all the crap in and around that has been added by lesser engineers to specs influenced by marketers).
So where was I? Windows on a phone - what could possibly go wrong? Win Pho 7 was based on CE (more or less) and that was bad enough. This incompetence could cost lives. Ring an emergency number and - oh, the phone is rebooting!
EPIC FAIL
Re: How much worse can it get?
Oh No! My phone's rebooting! Now the emergency services will never know that a jumbo jet's just crashed / that train's driven over a cliff / the queen's favourite corgi has eaten some raw chicken, 'cos no-one else will ring them.
Or maybe, if we're reaaaaaaaaaaally lucky, someone else might have a phone.
It's a mobile phone rebooting ferchrissakes, aren't you being a wee bit OTT?
Re: How much worse can it get?
A Google search for "Android crash" returns "About 173,000,000 results". Just saying..
Re: How much worse can it get?
Meanwhile back in reality world a logical assessment would probably conclude that given this problem appears to be limited to a couple of phone models there is probably a power configuration issue with the hardware which the OS will come to the rescue of.
One of the reasons for windows OS size is that it does try to be all things to all hardware configs. And guess what - Linux flavours are now following the same path having realised that saying to potential users "you don't want to do it that way" wasn't much of a marketing strategy.
Re: How much worse can it get?
Yes but WP8 has reboot on BOTH users!
Re: How much worse can it get?
For the record I have an Android phone (LG Optimus One) which needs a reboot about twice a week. Mildly annoying but not a very big deal. It does mean I can't rely on it as my main alarm clock. After loading a software update the frequency may have reduced but not massively, so it's likely to be an intermittent hardware fault.
I've used Linux on the desktop as my main home PC OS for about 16 years, run Windows on my work PC and use virtual machines for the rest.
Re: How much worse can it get?
@Edon - You just said that you need to re-install Windows every few months, so I think we all know how authoritative you are about the Windows operating system.
Just like lots of Windows fanboys and Linux fanboys, you make the mistake of presuming that the other is not worth using, based of a bare minimum of information self selected for what fits your worldview. Can you say "Confirmation bias"?
Re: How much worse can it get?
Applications crash on all platforms, and it's not a reflection on the platform, more on the developer (Although Apple seems to be the worst, but they never throw an error or submit crash feedback).
OS rebooting is something entirely different.
Re: How much worse can it get?
LOL. A wonderful insight from a blinkered view of the world. Windows Phone isn't the Windows desktop. It's much smoother and faster.
I've used all forms of smartphone and Windows is no less reliable than anything around.
Android isn't superb quality either, Google even missed out December from the calendar in the latest update. Such a schoolboy error.
Re: How much worse can it get?
never had an android unit crsh yet and im on my third. i just dont load rubbish apps on there which as usual are the cause of instability.
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