Windows 7 freezes

Torrent, Out of curiosity (and in extreme general terms) how would you rate Win7 in terms of set-up/running issues as compared to Vista and XP?
Would you say it is more picky about being set up correctly and how it handles drivers and such?

I do not presume to answer for TorrentG but I will offer my own "general" thoughts on the matter. Rather than thinking which OS I think of which bit size.

Microsoft has gone to great lengths to rein in unruly drivers for the 64-bit OS requiring strict standards for signed driver qualification. But 32-bit drivers have always been a mess and for compatibility they still accept the old drivers on 32-bit systems. I believe as more and more people go 64-bit the driver issues will decrease.

Ehh..I dunno..driver issues are common on both x86 and x64. All the time, every day, I see x64 Windows 7 with February 2009 Realtek lan drivers that crash, ASACPI.sys (ASUS driver) from 2005 that crashes etc...

It's true that you can not install unsigned drivers, by default, in x64. That doesn't stop people from installing ancient x64 drivers though.

As for Vista/7 differences, Vista is probably slightly more tolerant of older driver dates in many cases, because these drivers were specifically written at the time for it, then. Many users install Vista or even XP drivers in 7. It works in lots of cases. Others, it's not good.

Any of the three OS can be made to be perfectly stable with choosing a good antivirus instead of bsod causer, and careful attention to the latest drivers from manufacturers' sites.

Hi Torrent. I’d have responded sooner but have been away for a few days.
I do acknowledge and respect your expertise with the Windows OS, and I realize you’ve helped a lot a people on this forum. I also recognize that we expect a lot from a system that has to run in tons of different hardware and software environments. I guess you’re going to say that the very many patches, hot fixes and updates released by Microsoft are to cope with unforeseen problems related to user hardware and software and don’t reflect any issues with the basic OS. But the line between an OS problem and a user-generated problem is fuzzy, to put it mildly.
I installed Win7 precisely because it had been so heavily tested before release, and because so many experts said it was way superior to XP and Vista. Yet from the very start and for the first two weeks after installation, I could access the internet on only about 1 of 3 boot-ups. This frustrating problem was finally solved by a kind person like yourself on a different forum who had discovered that the random internet access problem, shared by many other users new to Win 7, arose from a service called “Bonjour” (aka "##Id_String2.6844F930_1628_4223_B5CC_5BB94B879762##") which is a service created by Apple (!) and which needed to be swapped from “automatic” to “automatic (delayed start)” — end of problem. Now, that service was installed from the Microsoft Win 7 DVD. I didn’t go near Quicktime or any Apple software till long after. I reckon that glitch is unequivocally a problem with the OS, though of course you might also argue the fault somehow lies with Apple.
The point of my first post was that the freezing fault I’m experiencing is complained of all over the web, with an identical description, yet there seems to have been no coherent, effective solution suggested. Yep, something is taking the attention of Win 7 when my computer temporarily freezes. Sure, it may be my antivirus hogging CPU or memory; but Avira is recommended by loads of ‘expert’ magazines and websites and it doesn’t slow down XP on my dual boot machine running exactly the same hardware and much of the same software as I run on Win 7. Yep, some piece of hardware or software may be diverting Win 7 but not XP's attention, but I’m fully conscious of that sort of possibility and try to watch for changes in performance when I install something new. The freezing started without any temporal relation to any new items.
When I run Win 7 with Task Manager open at ‘processes’ plus a system monitor displaying usage, only “System Idle Process” ever seems to hog much CPU (but still <10%) and my RAM usage never exceeds 50% of my 4Gb. This applies even when the system freezes. Forgive me for continuing to think there is a problem with Win 7, at the very least because it seems to offer no useful diagnostic to provide an indication when it’s being hogged.
Apologies for long post/diatribe: I don’t expect an answer.

Hmmmm..I don't think so. Don't see it on any of my installs. Only on XP with I-tunes.

I was one of the first ever (if not, the first) to post about the Bonjour service and what it does to cripple Windows networking. It is not in any way part of Windows. It is commonly installed with Photoshop or iTunes.

You want to completely uninstall that junk from the machine.

Win7 has no problems with freezing whatsoever. None. Now 3rd party software installed...sure. Or hardware issues, sure.

Thanks yodap and Torrent (and I'm not surprised if you were first to pick up on the Bonjour problem, Torrent). I don't have an iPod, Pad or Phone but most certainly DO have Photoshop and installed it (part of CS3 Creative Suite) straight after win 7. Will uninstall Bonjour right away. BTW, I never get a freeze when I'm running the Adobe (now updated to CS5) software - photoshop, premiere, after effects and encore: does that give any hint about possible sources of the freeze?

One point I would like to add. When I look at the descriptions of windows updates before I install them, I would say 95% or more are related to modifications to the system because of hacker exploits. I would not say that is a fault of the OS because the OS works, but instead I see it as a problem with humanity that nasty people on a daily basis are out to harm others. Probably another 1% are for Microsoft to try to protect themselves and music companies with WAT and rights management services because bad people steal. Another 1% are additional functionality, such as Silverlight, which admittedly are so Microsoft can make additional money or to regain some control of services initially provided by companies that aren't them. So I would say at least 97% of all windows are some form of greed or control unrelated to any fault of the OS. Add another 1 or 2% for driver updates and monthly malware scans.

The question that should be asked then is what has changed in the O/S when going from XP to 7 that causes Bonjour to effect 7 but not XP.
Is it as TM suggested a protectionist thing from M/S? I run itunes and if I delete Bonjour then the next time I try to run itunes it re-installs it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_%28software%29

After updating all my drivers and cleaning the inside of my PC it still frooze until i tried this solution. Now I havent experienced any freezes in the past week or so.