Windows Vista Should Track Non-Responding Applications

[Jason Dunn]

That's the "White Screen of Wait" (WSOW) - when an application stops responding and you try to interact with it, Windows Vista will fade the application white to indicate that there's a problem with it. I see that more often than I care to admit when using Windows Vista, and I have the gut feeling it happens more often than it did with Windows XP. Thankfully, the rest of Vista remains snappy and responsive, but I wish I could understand why some applications are so prone to WSOWs. Vista has a great tool called the Reliability and Performance Monitor, and it keeps track of how often applications crash (like when I was having a really bad day with Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0), software that you install and un-install, hardware failures, etc. What it doesn't keep track of, however, is how often WSOWs happen. If it did, it would give Microsoft (and us as users) hard metrics about which applications are prone to random lock-ups. I wish WSOWs didn't happen, but so long as they continue happening, we should be able to track them.

[Jason Dunn]

That's the "White Screen of Wait" (WSOW) - when an application stops responding and you try to interact with it, Windows Vista will fade the application white to indicate that there's a problem with it. I see that more often than I care to admit when using Windows Vista, and I have the gut feeling it happens more often than it did with Windows XP. Thankfully, the rest of Vista remains snappy and responsive, but I wish I could understand why some applications are so prone to WSOWs. Vista has a great tool called the Reliability and Performance Monitor, and it keeps track of how often applications crash (like when I was having a really bad day with Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0), software that you install and un-install, hardware failures, etc. What it doesn't keep track of, however, is how often WSOWs happen. If it did, it would give Microsoft (and us as users) hard metrics about which applications are prone to random lock-ups. I wish WSOWs didn't happen, but so long as they continue happening, we should be able to track them.

[BugDude10]

Funny you should mention this, Jason.

Just before I made my online rounds of the Thoughts Media Empire last night, I did a little test with Outlook 2007 on my Vista laptop. It crashed five straight times before running right: I opened Outlook, clicked on an e-mail message, then hit "Reply", only to get the WSOW. Two of the five times, Outlook re-started itself automatically and took me right back to the message I was viewing, although it crashed as soon as I hit Reply; the other three times, I had to re-start Outlook myself first, before making it crash by trying to Reply to an e-mail.

I appreciate that Vista might be trying to accomplish something with the application error reporting mechanism, but seriously, Outlook does this to me all the time, and so far Vista hasn't given me any solutions. (Or, should I say, Microsoft hasn't given me any solutions -- for the latest version of the program it created specifically to handle e-mail, running under its latest version of its operating system. Sheesh.)

[Gordo]

I frequently have similar issues. I just switch to another computer, work on something else, and check back in a few minutes. Usually, the program has responded. Not the best solution.

[Kacey Green]

hopefully these are less frequent in sp1
it happens about 4 times as often on my core duo notebook with 2 gb of ram and 1 gb of ready boost than it does on my core 2 duo desktop with less than 1gb of ram but with a real video card and a healthy l2 cache 4mb if i remember correctly

maybe it's raw processing power

echer style