David Risley is the founder of PCMech.com. He is the brains, the thinker, the writer, the nerd.There is a lawsuit against Microsoft afoot for the misrepresentation of the “Vista capable” designation. The judge in that case got a collection of internal emails. In that collection of emails comes an interesting statistic: that almost 30% of logged crashes of Windows Vista were caused by Nvidia video drivers.
According to the story on Ars:
Microsoft’s data strongly indicates that the problems were real. Damon Poeter at CRN dug through the documentation to find that on page 47 of the PDF, NVIDIA drivers were identified as the cause of over 479,000 crashes, or just under 29 percent of all the crashes Microsoft logged. Microsoft’s own drivers follow, at 17.9 percent, and the “Unknown” category takes third place at 17 percent. ATI is in fourth place (9.3 percent) and Intel in fifth place (8.83 percent).
We have been hearing about problems with Nvidia under Vista from PCMech visitors. In fact, I personally had issues using Nvidia in 2007 under Vista. I had to actually go out and spring for an ATI card just to make my video system work under Windows Vista. Needless to say, I was pissed.
So, these emails pretty much confirm what we informally already knew: Nvidia was (and perhaps is still) problematic under Windows Vista.
Even Microsoft VPs got “personally burnt” by the Vista-capable stickers.
It really is hard to imagine how Microsoft could have so royally screwed up with Windows Vista.
Two words: Save XP.
Source: Ars Technica via Engadget
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Rich Menga, a native New Englander residing in Tampa Bay Florida, 
3/28/2008 4:19 pm
So it’s MS’s fault that Nvidia cannot write a driver?
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3/29/2008 8:06 am
Considering that all my Vista crashes have been related to NVidia drivers, I’m not surprised by those findings. Again yesterday my machine locked up - after installing SP1, I forgot to check if it had put a newer version of the display driver and, of course, it crashed. Good thing I keep that old year-old-or-so version of the driver handy.
Other than that, Vista is working great here on two computers. Save XP? Please, everybody bashed XP as a piece of crap less than 2 years ago, and now it’s the best thing since sliced bread? I for one don’t miss its Teletubbies-like interface. Why not save Windows 2000 instead? And so far Vista has been more stable for me than XP ever was (Nvidia drivers were problematic on XP as well) - I guess I just got lucky on that one.
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3/29/2008 11:52 pm
I can’t believe MS is so stupid that they didn’t verify that their program would work with the premium video card manufacturer (Nvidia) used by 90% of the high-end commercial workstations (Dell Precision 690 w/ Quadro FX4500 512MB card and 8GB ram- $6k to $8k retail) running one of the leading 3D solid modeling programs (SolidWorks Premium - $7k retail)
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4/1/2008 8:54 pm
It’s a mystery. I’m running an Intel Extreme Series motherboard and processor, Vista Ultimate 64-bit, and an EVGA (NVidia) 8800GT video card. Been running for about 3 months, no crashes. Not one. In fact, this is the most stable system I’ve ever worked with.
Maybe you’re not holding your mouth right?
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4/6/2008 3:14 am
I knew those NVDA guys were nothing but trouble! After I bought their stock it tanked!
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