Windows Phone 8 reboot woe causes outpouring of forum misery Early adopters of Windows Phone 8 hardware are complaining that it reboots at random, up to several times a day, and that they're not being offered any prospect of a quick fix. The complaints relate specifically to the HTC 8X and, to a lesser extent, Nokia's Lumia 920, with Windows Phone 8 locking up or randomly rebooting on …
Re: "What did people expect"
"A quick, stable, interesting alternative to iOS and Android???
Close but no cigar"
Well Sparky...I have had TWO Motorola Droid (one Android Gingerbread & one ICS) phones DO THIS EXACT SAME THING...and had them replaced by Verizon because of it.
Now...number THREE is now starting to do this as well. So it's not exclusive to Windows...sorry.
Unbelievable trolling on your part dude, sad to see....
Running Lumia 920 since Friday, no reboots, no crashes everything smooth and looking ohhh so sweet.
Dumbass comments on here from you and other android fanbois won't stop a great product!! I can't speak for the 8X but I can for the 920.
Side Note: As a little research project maybe you should take a look at the best phones on amazon.com wireless. Right now I think there might be 6/7 windows phones in the top 10 with the majority having very high ratings from customers. Yes I know thats USA Only but it's an easy place to look early in the shelf life.
My Lumia 920 has been faultless. I suspect this is going to become a largely over-reported problem that a small minority of users will experience.
On the other hand it doesn't excuse the problem but I don't think MS has that arrogance towards users (especially in mobile) any more - so it might actually get fixed promptly!
"Haha! And to prove my point, who do you think downvoted me there? Actual LOL!"
LOL, ok I'll feed ya. I'm surprised you've only got one down vote so far considering the trollishness of the comment. I guess this second post was because you weren't getting enough to eat. Pity you're not like my Nokia E66 as it only needs to be fed once every ten days or so.
This almost religious attitude to OS platforms is pathetic and quite frankly hilarious. People seem to think that choosing one over another is 'making a statement'. I choose whatever I think will best suit my needs. If you're judging me on something so insubstantial as what phone I'm carrying around then you're not worthy of my time or attention.
What do you use your phone for?
Phone Calls? (Yes that's becoming a smaller percentage of time on the phone... ;-)
Emails?
Texts?
Camera?
Surfing the web?
Music App?
Then there's VOIP....
Until you have enough occurrences and enough data of failures, it could be anything. A bad port of an iOS or Android App that causes Microsoft to fail could be the culprit and unless you use said app or class of apps, you don't know what it is.
You can't test for every potential failure. It may just take a 'perfect storm'....
Actually in my case all of the above, but I think you're concurring with my point - it's a difficult issue to reproduce and on that basis, not many users will be affected.
Nonetheless, MS can't afford the negative publicity, so what might be a fringe-case issue will still get serious attention from MS and the WP8 OEMs.
"....and (in the case of Nokia) booting the phone without a SIM for ten minutes, then booting with the SIM back in again, which apparently worked for one user"
I can't help but read these anecdotal "solutions" and wonder if I put "Sacrificing my first born to our Lord and Saviour the almight Satan worked for me" whether people would believe it could be an actual solution as much as the faith they put in these generally baseless techniques.
While I love your sarcasm, sadly there are far too many people on this planet who believe their God is better than all the others and that anecdotal evidence is widely accepted as gospel (and I'm not limiting this to technology solutions).
Clearly none of them has ever heard of Science, and a logical approach where you change ONE thing at a time in a repeatable manner before you start proclaiming you've found the answer to life the universe and 42.
"Seriously, I doff my cap in respect to another voice of sanity in this wilderness inhabited by various *bois"
You respect someone who veers from talking about problems with mobile phones into a moan about religion? Would you want this guy sat next to you in the pub/tube/bus? Especially between you and the exit?
You must be Catholic then...
Sorry, I'm thinking back to the segment in Monty Python's "Meaning of Life" where the Protestant can use condom but the poor Catholic sod couldn't because the Pope says no to contraceptive.
Note: I'm not judging, just saying...
Anon, because I do know that there are religious zealots who would take my comment the wrong way.
Just Saying!
That time it was a problem with the Zune music player freezing up during playback of DRM'd music. Required a battery remove/refit - power button didn't even work. The support thread ran into literally hundreds of pages and it took about 5 months for us to get a fix from HTC. I swore then that I'd a) Never go back to HTC because they didn't seem to have the motivation to fix it and b) never be an early adopter again.
For what it's worth, I still have my WP7 and I'm very pleased with it and has been rock solid since we got the fix. No immediate plans to upgrade to WP8 just yet though, want to see how responsive MS/HTC/Nokia are at getting these issues fixed. If this rolls on for longer than a couple of weeks or so then that will justify my hesitation to upgrade. Will be interesting to see how fast they get a fix out.
"The problem isn't universal, though if reboots are intermittent and rare users may not be reporting them - unless it interrupts something one is doing then a reboot isn't very disruptive."
Or say, you have a sim passcode, and then you just have no calls until you next look at the phone. Then it is a big deal.
But I have had my Apple 4S reboot on its own. Of course I wasn't in the middle of anything and I don't usually turn my phone off, so I have to wonder if there's a memory leak or something that just takes time to cause it to kill my phone.
Again, it could be nothing, or it could be the combination of apps that I run.
Were it frequent and stopping me from using my phone, you can bet that I'd dump it and go to another phone ASAP. (In all honesty, I'd consider a Nokia, not that I'm a window's guy, but that it's price point with contract, and the solid build makes sense. )
If Windows was so bad then industry would grind to a halt. Given the 90% plus marketshare of Windows on the desktop you can't really justify that remark without providing some figures or estimates on improved productivity if everyone used Linux.
Many organisations have tried to move their office desktops to Linux and have ended up going back to Windows.
> If Windows was so bad then industry would grind to a halt. Given the 90% plus marketshare of Windows on the desktop...
"Industry" does not run on desktop computers. Those parts that do, are generally not real-time processes. Windows does not have "90% plus" marketshare on servers, where stability really matters.
> Many organisations have tried to move their office desktops to Linux and have ended up going back to Windows.
And many organisations have successfully made the transition from Windows, and not looked back. But those organisations don't get paid by Microsoft to make press releases about it.
@AC
I feel you might have overlooked the power of having a critical mass of users... Facebook users don't like way it treats them, but can't change to something more respectful because their friends are on it. eBay is under no pressure to improve itself, since people selling things will want to use the auction site with the most users. And we have all heard of how businesses locked themselves into using Windows because of applications that require IE 5.
Many small businesses use Sage products because the Inland Revenue likes it, and so 3rd party software vendors make their sector-specific software integrate with it... and Sage isn't available for Linux.
Businesses can't jump horses in mid-stream, even if a demonstrably better horse presents itself.
In the above example, I hope they filed requests for the missing functionality, if you don't ask you don't get and unlike a product like Microsoft Office you pay your money and that earns you the right to act like a prima donna when it lacks the required support.
Apache owned OpenOffice only gets better with a flow of feedback from the people using it and finding problems with it, identifying things that can be improved and contribution from developers who are charitable enough to contribute their time to the code base to provide a realistic alternative to Microsoft Office.
Some businesses make the mistake of seeing it as a Microsoft Office substitute with very attractive price tag, but fail to see that if they aren't willing to get involved by feeding back to the community then they might as well stick with the one that comes in a box.
"have gone back", eh? Why not follow this up with examples for which this is true? The decision on whether Freiburg are going to go back to MS Office or not is in fact to be made tomorrow (in German: http://www.heise.de/open/meldung/Freiburg-Widerspruch-gegen-die-Office-Migration-1751357.html).
As has been pointed out, other towns such as Munich, Jena and Leipzig and others have happily converted to OpenOffice and are overall content with the change with no intentions of moving back. There is also the issue that they sit on old versions OpenOffice instead of regularly updating which according to the OSB Alliance (in German: open letter in response to the suggestion of a move back to MS Office: http://www.osb-alliance.de/themen-aktuelles/detailansicht/artikel/beschlussvorlage-g12-223-anwendung-von-offenen-standards-und-quelloffener-software-open-source/) would alleviate many of their issues. They make a lot of other I find good points and we'll see how it plays out.
If Windows was so bad then industry would grind to a halt.
A recent "Time and Motion" study where I work showed between 30 minutes and 2 hours per employee, per day lost to the inefficiencies, instabilities and inconsistencies of Windows. That's why we've banned it. We also don't allow Mac, due to its basic incompatibility with everything else... There is only one sane option!
Windows being bad literally is an industry. If it were fixed tens of millions of people would find themselves out of a job.
The parasite ecosystem is the most salient feature of Windows, and its biggest reason for existance.
Sad to have to soil the once proud word 'industry' that way.
This post has been deleted by its author
WP7 didn't have the same problem - my HTC Trophy never did that and it's about 20 months old. Yours may have - and that sucks - but that doesn't mean the OS somehow was the problem. It wasn't. Probably a hardware issue where accessing an infrequently-used component (say, GPS?) is causing a serious error.
First, I have GPS disabled on my phone. Second if it was a hardware thing it would have continued, it didn't - it stopped doing it at some point after I installed an update, which would suggest it was a WP7 thing not a hardware thing.
Just because your Trophy never had the problem doesn't mean it wasn't an OS issue - just as some of the WP8 devices are not suffering from the issues discussed in this article.
Thanks anyway.
Is it just me that detests the "reboot culture" of tech support?
Sure, it fixes the immediate problem (i.e. my computer is inaccessible) but it doesn't solve the actual problem or its causes in any, shape or form.
I've heard it for every problem known to man and if a reboot gets you to a working machine then it's "problem solved" according to the support lines and off you're supposed to trundle. ISP's are particularly mad on this and I have just moved to a leased line at work because the line we have CAN be fixed by rebooting the modem - but we have to reboot it 10-20 times a day. And now its creeping into daily life when your phone needs rebooting, or your media player, or you Blu-Ray player, or your games console or even your car (OBD etc.). Fix-by-rebooting is like saying "Well, if you start your car and it doesn't show the same 'I have no brakes' problem that you just experienced at 70mph on the motorway when it restarts, then your problem is solved".
And not just that, but incessant reboots to do trivial tasks are the bane of my life. I can't count the number of forced reboots I have to endure throughout the working day for NO GOOD REASON.
When tech support anywhere tell me to reboot, I pause for a minute, say "Yep, done that" and then hope they'll get on with actually solving the damn problem.
Having spent more time than I care to mention on 3rd line support, there is a reason for the reboot culture - it tends to "fix" the incident.
If you are genuinely rebooting on the scale you suggest, then your support *should* have been altering an incident to a problem (ITIL standard), since you have an underlying issue that needs to be resolved.
As for other comments about continuous reboots/rebuilds. I rebuilt my PC 2 weeks ago, for the first time since November 2007. It had been running Vista 64bit for all that time, mostly on long stints without rebooting - what had been changed over that time period was the motherboard (wanted a PCI-e 2.1 mobo), the CPU cooler (went from air to water cooled), the soundcard (went from onboard to Asus D2X), the memory (went from 4GB to 8GB), the graphics card (X1950 to 8800GT to 8800GTS to HD5770), the PSU (replaced with a modular supply) and the case (needed more drive bays). All of that done with the same OS install and it was running at almost the same speed at the end as the start (boot-up wise).
To all those who think you need to rebuild every 6 months, learn to build it properly in the first place and that becomes unnecessary.
Yah, That "Keyboard nor found" error floors me every time, but unfortunately, it's a BIOS error, not a Windows one. It goes back to IBM PS/2 systems, I think, but may have been in the original IBM PC as well (I don't have anything that old to test on, I threw my wife's 5150 away when she got a Tosh T1000 laptop for £25 about 10 years ago).
My youngest son has a different problem. He has a Microsoft Sidewinder mouse plugged into a Windows 7 system, and after about an hour, it stops working. Unplug and replug, and it works again. Plug it into ANY other OS (not tried Windows 8, admittedly), and it works perfectly for ever. And this appears to be a well reported problem. Still, it's a bit off topic.
Reboot culture lays at Microsoft's door. It's so pervasive now that I regularly come across the attitude that non windows servers need to be regularly rebooted, like linux boxes. That simply isn't the case!
I must also point out that there are some very dodgy statistics being quoted by some above. 90% of computers do not run Windows. Admittedly Linux hasn't really taken off as a desktop OS but server side it has a massive share of the market and that is continuing to grow. When you introduce IOS and Android you can clearly see why Windows 8 is so make or break for Microsoft, their market share continues to be eroded.
I don't want to see the end of Microsoft, but learning a little humility would do them a lot of good.
Would reset itself at bizarre random times.
Like once in the middle of a call when I was telling them that despite the snow and ice I was ok and hadn't crashed the car (using handsfree of course!) - then having to wait around 10 minutes before I could call them back to complete the conversation!
Called Sony Ericsson support who went - oh it does that! It's because it's had an update. Really - they updated it a lot then - reset almost twice a day at one stage...
Don't compare Windows Mobile with Windows Phone, the specs are tightly controlled and there is a less wide range of hardware running it. So the drivers are supplied by Microsoft and not OEMs.
Windows Mobile was more crashy, but that was down to bad coding of apps and drivers by 3rd party developers.
My 920 has been rick solid, no lockups or reboots...
All hardware will have a bad day at some point, my iPhone certainly had its fair share of moments... Apps closing to desktop, mail wiping its contents and having to re download from scratch, phone needing a reboot and in one case a full restore... Its one of those things!
The hardware looks decent enough, and it's unlikely to have exactly the same faults in the same places from different manufacturers. Would someone give it a go, just to tell us what we already know please? Well, apart from the bright yellow one which is clearly beyond redemption, no matter if it runs quality software or WP8.
I think not this is microsofts way of life. There should have been extensive testing on the platforms this brick was going to be sold on. I'm a Linux user, have been for more than 15 years and my HTC Amaze runs Android. I can't comment on your woes because desktop and phone both run flawlessly. Always have. I'm sure microsoft will have this all straightened out just before the release of Brick 9 and as usual support for you guys will be suspended.
"...I can't comment on your woes because desktop and phone both run flawlessly. Always have..."
You've been using Linux for 15 years on the desktop and it's always been flawless? I have literally never met someone who has made such a comment and I work with Linux every day and have worked with it pretty much every day for about the same amount of time you claim it's been flawless. What a ridiculous thing to say, sheesh, fanboys.
You don't get many problem with Linux since there's no decent applications to run on it.
Photoshop, Office, Cubase Audio, Final Cut? nope.
It doesn't take much effort to run VI and Apache, it's old crap that is very slowly developed. While the rest of us on Windows and OSX are using applications from this decade.
could you try mounting a usb drive with two partitions
OK, I don't use my Win XP VM more than once every 2..3 weeks or so, but that one surprises me - I have never experienced that as a problem. Not even on Win 7 machines.
I look at the bright side: Microsoft actually delivered. The user experience is now identical across all hardware platforms Win 8 works on..
/me donning flame proof underwear..
Are one of the worst things to happen to a new product, and if you love your new gadget it should worry you for a couple of reasons...
1. The intermittent faults are hard to diagnose and push out a fix, mostly because companies then to be sluggish in dealing with problems that only seems affect a few users.
2. It could happen to you, especially when you don't need it to. The fault could be caused by installing an app, or using a embedded service in a certain way, and sods law states that it will bite you in the arse just when you need it the most.
Mostly have a thought for those it does happen to, if your new shiny started rebooting intermittently wouldn't you be pissed?
What dammed fool allowed a BETA of Skype out into the wild; with its integration into the People-tab, phone & messaging.. you’re not Apple (where people will blame themselves); you’re not Google (where people will assume it was the battery); you got to be as solid as a dropped iPhone (but without the cracked screen).
Having all my {phone, fleecebook, linkedin, twitter, skppe} contacts in the people tile is only a feature if it’s solid, otherwise you’re better off with half-a-dozen apps. Making Skype calls from the phone app is neat for long-distance but has to be rock solid ‘cus the phone app is safety critical
Why has Microsoft not taken these Windows 8 phone problems to task, by first publicly announcing the existence of issues, then stating quite strongly and clearly that they fully intend to solve problems and "attempt" to provide solution by specified date.
This will offer the publc some confidence that Microsoft is not the same ole - long denial first, then minimizing the problems, then offering broken remedies, then finally fixing the problems after an extended period of time - usually long after some third party had produced a fix. In other words they are serious about providing good (quality) products and services to the public without crass exploitation motives.
Even though I have always been extremely skeptical about any substantive changes in Microsoft's draconian and repressive policies and practices towards competitors, particularly those in Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystem, it was with some hope that the company changed for the positive with introduction of Windows 8 products.
There is a need for broader competition in the technology field in quality, reasonably priced products and services. So far though, the results from Microsoft are not encouraging. Maybe Steve Balmer (still) at the helm remain a negative factor. With all their money, experience and constantly declared "innovation" capability, excuses and lots of time won't do.
Looks like this issue is primarily affecting HTC handsets - and I have to say I am not surprised.
My last HTC (WP7) device rebooted in exactly this way until they released a firmware update some 4 months later. HTC support were completey and utterly useless thoughout the entire debacle.
those posters who are pointing the finger at microsoft might want to remember that MS write and test the OS, but its the manufacturer who writes and tests the firmware for their handset. This is HTC`s failure.
I`ll never buy another HTC phone again.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
