29% of Windows Vista crashes caused by NVIDIA drivers

I'm not sure about the causation / blame being established here. Let's review. Three MAJOR changes to Vista:

1. Display model
2. Driver model
3. Account priv's model

#1 and #2 directly impact graphics -- and NVIDIA has a huge share of that market.

The crash graph here doesn't say what caused a crash, only where it occurred. It's not a graph of whose programmers are to blame. I think the safer message to take away would be that the OS and graphics drivers were not mature last year ... and we knew that anyway.

I'm finding Vista to be very stable now. I was finding it to be absurdly UNSTABLE early last year, prior to some key updates to the OS and third-party graphics drivers (and other interrelated hardware drivers) with bugfixes. Those problems clearly were happening in the area of greatest change.

Hmm. Funny that on Linux, Nvidias proprietary drivers are the better ones, and have been for some time. Maybe their efforts were put where the future is :)

Thou open source drivers would of course be for the best in the end - and ATI/AMD is currently opening their specs for devs to see, so that may yet change. At the moment, best solution for high-end graphics on Linux is Nvidia.

This blows me away. When I had an ATI card I was treated to a BSOD at least every week, after getting a (fairly inexpensive) NVIDIA card they went away completely.
http://www.vistabluescreen.com

(Correction: The video card related BSOD's went away, there were a few others afterwards)

Does anyone else realize that this pie chart adds upto 100.3%.....

so vista is crashing on the main 3 graphic card manufacturer's drivers.. do i see a pattern here??
maybe vista is blaming weak video-driver interfaces on the video drivers..

I'm currently using a laptop with Windows Vista and Nvidia Geforce 8600M GT and it keeps crashing! The screen just turns black but I can still hear the audio in the background (if I'm playing music). I've tried updating my drivers and still don't do any good. In a week it crashes at least 2-3 times. No other way to resolve it except to restart my computer. =(

Petey - Thanks for the heads-up on the updated Dell drivers. I've had my Lat 830 for a couple of months w/regular NVidia problems on Vista. Hopefully the update resolves this. Other than that (and getting used to the security) I like the O/S. To forestall the flame mail - I also use XP; Ubuntu and Red Hat Linux. Likes and dislikes with all.

I have 2 ATI's Radeon 3870 (Crossfired), Working With Vista Ultimate. I have to say that it's extremely stable (Working with 1920x1200 Resolution), though I have ATI's Products, It's Working Great with Vista.

Sometimes When I Use Dual Monitors (I Have To Disable CrossFire To Work With Multiple Monitors) The OS Crashes.

I Really did not know what to buy NVidia Or ATI, Finally I Chose ATI, Guess I Made The Right Decision.

The Nvidia problem is the chipset drivers (I've got N430 and an 8500GT), and even more so on x64 versions of Vista, I can't believe just how bad they are. I get appcrashes all the time and DirectX hangups too, and regular BSOD. Not only that but I can't get the sound driver to work properly, I'm sure it's a chipset problem because I've used the driver on non-Nvidia systems and it worked.

Also the screen just turns black when Media Center is turned on - this appears to be a problem many people are having if you do an internet search. It is recoverable from by starting up task manager (either by hitting the windows key to show the toolbar or by using Ctrl+Alt+Del) and then shutting down media center.

Nvidia just keep telling me to use the latest beta driver, the only thing that has helped even marginally so far is the latest DirectX update which has slightly reduced the number of BSOD and some hangs can now be recovered from.

I have a dual boot setup with Vista Ultimate and Linux. Since I have these two side by side I get a great look into how the two respective Nvidia drivers perform respectively, for each OS. Vista with SP1 crashes on average 2 -3 times per day when running graphics intensive games. It even crashes alot when running the Windows Media Center LiveTV. Linux of course never crashes since it is modular (ie. if X windows locks up just restart X, or whatever app), but it also never crashes when running the same graphics intensive Windows game via Wine at full settings with WindowsXP set at default. I could understand random crashes in Windows had I overclocked my stuff, but this is with everything at stock settings! This is EXACTLY the problem with Windows (and all proprietary closed source code) though - when things go wrong your left with little to no options to fix things yourself and get a working, stable system back again quickly. Your only option is to sit around and wait for some company to post a fix which sometimes never happens. Would not be a big deal had one not paid good money for it, and the "support" that is supposed to accompany it. Aint it weird though that for me, using free/Open Source software has thus far been the more stable and fully funtional solution from everything to Office applications to chat clients to games on a system that never crashes, never gets Virii or spyware or worms/trojan horses, handles resources much better, and is fully tailorable to the exact degree I want it while costing me 0$.

I purchased a new Dell Vostro 400 in March 08 with NVIDIA GeForce 8000 GT - the standard graphics card option. It came loaded with Vista Home Premuim. I had daily BSODs right out of the box. The Dell chat help people asked me to report stop codes etc. and eventually asked me to start swapping out my RAM modules while on the phone with them to see if that would work - or maybe I could just run in protected mode for a few days, and unplug all peripherals, by the way. I left on vacation before I went to a next step. When I returned, I downloaded SP1, and have had no crashes in several days, so far.

I don't know what caused the BSOD, maybe more than one thing. I think the Dell chat help is pretty worthless for this problem.

I have been plagued with BSOD's. Running an Intel DG965WH mainboard, Q6600 CoreDuo Quad processor, Nvidia 7600GT, and two SATA RAID volumes (250Gb & 500Gb). Multiple daily crashes were frequent.

Updating the Nvidia drivers to the latest from their website helped a little. These are not the ones available from Windows Update which are an earlier version. Intel posted a BOIS update a few days ago dated 3/26/2008. I updated to this latest BIOS version and haven't had a crash since.

So I unknowingly had the kiss of death: Nvidia and Intel. I had been unable to run Vista since its release all due to these third party vendors. At least it appears they finally got it right...

Just stopping by to report:

Intel Pentium D 3GHz
2046 MB RAM
Vista 32-bit
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT

Since 1/08
no BSOD yet

fwiw

I am a proud Linux user, and I am not going to bad mouth you who decide to stay just using Microsoft, but the comment to Gavin comes from someone that must have Redmond always in his heart. This is regarding the comment made to Gavin by Tank in March, this is not about running away from your problems. I believe that there is a place for every OS, but the fact is that Vista is a flop and that Linux may not become the default OS, but is here to stay. And thank goodness for that. So while all of you wait for your hardware manufacturers to come up with some driver to fix your problem, some of us have taken the hard plunge and learning curve to control our computer systems ourselves, and work with 64 bit operating systems that are far more stable than the Vista 64 bits. Yes, you have to learn how to use some command line, yes some compiling if you truly want to control, but let me tell you its worth it. By the way, I started using Linux back in January 2007, I am now 98% on Linux. It would have been 95%, had Vista 64 bit Home Edition, not kept crapping out every fifteen minutes due to some issue or other.