Why does there seem to be more BSODs with Win 7?

About 4 weeks ago I moved form XP Pro to Win 7 Pro 64-bit.

During the many years on XP Pro on different PCs I can't recall any BSODs - there may have been the odd one, but that's all.

Moving to Win 7 Pro 64-bit on my 8-month old PC I've had one or two BSODs a day. As all my drivers now show as up to date I hope BSODs are a thing of the past.

However I'm curious to try to understand why it generally seems that more BSODs are occurring on Win 7 than XP. My son upgraded his 3-year old PC to Win 7 2-3 months ago and, as far as I know has not had any BSODs.

Is it Win 7? Or is it going to 64-bit? Or what?

Just out of curiosity :)

tpriest said:

About 4 weeks ago I moved form XP Pro to Win 7 Pro 64-bit.

During the many years on XP Pro on different PCs I can't recall any BSODs - there may have been the odd one, but that's all.

Moving to Win 7 Pro 64-bit on my 8-month old PC I've had one or two BSODs a day. As all my drivers now show as up to date I hope BSODs are a thing of the past.

However I'm curious to try to understand why it generally seems that more BSODs are occurring on Win 7 than XP. My son upgraded his 3-year old PC to Win 7 2-3 months ago and, as far as I know has not had any BSODs.

Is it Win 7? Or is it going to 64-bit? Or what?

Just out of curiosity :)

Well, I'm running 64-bit Windows 7, and have never had a BSOD, and since most people I know have never had a BSOD under Win 7, I'd have to say there was something slightly incompatible with your hardware - maybe you should check to see if you are running the latest drivers and such. Did you upgrade from XP or did you do a clean install?

I was about to ask the same question: whether he upgraded from XP. Then I realized that's not possible - you can only upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 (and from XP to Vista, but that's another story).

It's either a hardware issue or a bad driver, of that I'm 95% sure. Were the correct chipset drivers installed, if any are available for your specific motherboard?

You're right, you can't upgrade from XP to W7, it was of course a clean install.

I'm sure that BSODs are the exception rather than the rule, indeed posters' experience here supports that view.

However, despite me looking for and installing W7 64-bit drivers it became increasingly apparent that even so they weren't up to date, as mentioned (or implied) in the OP, though I had taken every effort, or so I thought, to ensure I was up to date.

The point is that in general drivers (with one exception*) were never an issue with my present, or previous, PC, or my present netbook, running under XP. In the past I've never needed to run any sort of driver reporting program, I've run several recently to help me stabilise my W7 system (I may try running one on my XP netbook to see the driver situation on that). Such an approach was never needed with XP and it wasn't an issue I particularly concerned myself about as the system just worked, and worked fine.

My present system specs are posted in my profile and I don't think there's anything odd or special about them.

But it does seem that having the absolutely correct drivers is far more important for a stable system with W7 64-bit than it was for XP. Even having a slightly out of date driver now seems to be more potentially problematic than it ever was on XP.

I deliberately haven't talked about my specific BSODs, I posted a thread, with all the evidence, on the relevant forum the other day and have hopefully got it resolved. This post was more looking at the apparent generalities of the BSOD issues.

I don't know if anyone has attempted to see the ratio of reported BSODs between 32-bit and 64-bit W7 systems, perhaps there's far more experience of writing for 32-bit so they tend to be more reliable. I really don't know.

[* The one exception was with the Networx bandwidth monitor, a new release early this year resulted in frequent BSODs, reverting to the previous version cured it, I don't need Networx now so it's never been installed on my W7 system]

Follow these steps exactly to clean reinstall so you know you have the install perfect: Clean Reinstall steps

Then if you have any problems monitor the logs and use the System Resources to find the cause: troubleshooting steps

Any further BSOD's should be posted up to the Crashes forum here to find the cause and eliminate it: Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) Posting Instructions - Windows 7 Forums

It could be a single balky driver so start fresh with the Win7 installer and Updates drivers to get a baseline and go from there. Win7 is the authority on its drivers, unlike XP.

Thanks.

So far so good since the last BSOD on Thursday, I posted those details on the Crashes and Debugging forum and got a most helpful response.

At the moment (fingers crossed) things are ok and driver check programs, e.g. PC Pitstop Driver Alert, give me a clean bill of health.

Clearly if I get any more BSODs , I'll see if the dump can tell me anything (I use WhoCrashed) and take it from there.