DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

If your Windows machine crashed today, you have lots of company. As reported by Macintouch, John Dvorak writes, we can estimate that there are a minimum of 30 billion Windows system crashes a year.

Dvorak did the math based on estimates from Bill Gates. It’s an astounding level of non-productivity, all that rebooting and recovery. I guess people don’t know that it’s just not necessary. to put up with that ridiculously poor level of stability.

Most geeks cite the stability of Linux as a server platform. And it’s true — I’ve personally had Linux servers run for over a year, and even then they didn’t crash, but got powered down safely for one reason or another. But servers aren’t an equal comparison because they run a limited number of very stable apps.

Workstations crash more because users run lots of whacked-out, unstable, untested applications. Like web browsers. Like Java “crapplets”. Like rushed-to-market file-sharing apps with piggybacking spyware, or home-brewed Photoshop plugins. The list goes on.

But still, to crash three times a month? That’s the average figure Dvorak calculated from Gates’ numbers. It’s sad that computer users have come to accept this, as if they had no choice.

Here’s the choice: OS X.

My (Apple) Powerbook endures daily use, running all manner of applications, including the typical complement of beta-ware. It has crashed twice since I’ve owned it — say, about once every seven months. That is, my laptop has crashed one-twentieth as often as the average Windows machine.

Dvorak writes something else that ought to inspire about twenty million Windows users to switch: “the jury is still out on whether XP dies more often or less often than Windows 2000. From my experience, the number of crashes for each operating system is about equal.” If that’s really true, what the heck is the point of upgrading? To have a bunch of new features that don’t work well? If Microsoft isn’t trying to improve system stability, then who is?

Besides Apple, I mean.