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Why Do MS Metro Apps Crash So Much?

mtalinm

Active Member
I fnally paid he $5 for Start8 because I just couldn't take the frequent crashing of metro/modern/tileworld apps crashing so often. Mail is terrible, as is the browser. News and People are also a wreck. Calendar seems okay, but the others frequently hang and need to be restarted.

anyone else notice this? I'm hoping it has something to do with the 8.1 preview, but I'm not sure.

also seems like the Mail app has slowed down a ton - deleting messages can take several seconds.
 

machistmo

Active Member
Metro, now called Modern UI Experience is bad. There is no way around it. As all things MS are, their first attempt is not good. It was a major factor in my giving up on each of the devices I've had. Now that being said, the RTM seems to have improved some things though I have not had time to really look at it and have not installed it on my TPT2 as its hardware/software relationship makes the RTM a bad idea until its launched with supporting drivers etc. Our MS Architect and one of my coworkers have it installed on an M90z and a W530 and so far so good. It should be noted that the W530 required the changing of a display setting in the BIOS from Optimus to Discrete, installation of the Nvidia Beta video drivers and then changing that setting back, at least according to my co-worker.. Our MS guy thinks its the best thing ever, but he is very much the glass half full guy when it comes to windows 8 and all things MS.

i forgot to mention that 8.1 allows boot to desktop though its start button lacks the function of start8.
 
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JohnF

Member
I've never had a metro app crash. The mail, calendar, news and people have been working great for me. Not sure what you're doing differently? Maybe it is the 8.1 preview? I just loaded the 8.1 RTM and am equally pleased as I was with 8.0. I also don't use Start8. I installed the trial and at the end of the 30 days I realized I'd never even used it so I removed it. I haven't heard of it causing any problems though.
 

Buelligan

Member
I too, have NO issues with the "Metro" apps. I find my self using them more and more, because they are so stable and work so well with the touch environment. No 8.1 preview or RTM, I'll wait until it's official update.
 

kristalsoldier

Well-Known Member
I too have no issues with Metro apps - though I do notice a lag now and then - something which, as I have been told, will apparently be fixed in the 8.1 RTM version. Not quite sure what the problem is with your set up. Refresh your system maybe?
 
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mtalinm

Active Member
wow, this is unreal. they crash on me all the time. I think it's worse on 8.1 but it happened on the stock verson. i'll hold my breath until 8.1 RTM
 

machistmo

Active Member
Mine still crash, fail to load, fail to update, fail to actually load the updater etc... This is common with all Windows 8 and 8.1 preview. If people have had a 'perfect' experience then good for them, its not the norm and certainly Microsoft is hard at work fixing these 'known' issues. So you are not alone mtalinm, in fact if anyone is alone its the people in this forum. Most of the experiences out there with windows8 so far are not what you call, sustainable, in a business sense. I remain hopeful that MS will pull this one off, but one is forced to wonder what happened with Windows 8 originally, how could one company get it SO wrong this many times?! I am certain that 8.1 will not go far enough to repair windows 8 badly damaged reputation though. It is a bummer because 8 is SO light and nimble and really is better than 7 in a host of critical ways... Then throw in Metro which most people HATE and ruin it all. My neighbors father, who used to run hospital systems, now retired and drops in to see the her children frequently, ran out and upgraded 5 machines in his house with windows 8 the moment it was available and got so angry he downgraded to 7. This may have lead to his MacBook purchase, ( I don't know him well enough to know this for sure) but I do know he was a PC guy owning 5 who told me that even windows 9 might not be enough to get him to try another Microsoft product. That is a visceral reaction to an operating system. And we hear similar stories all the time.. All the time..

As for metro itself, and this is not the place for this debate, but I must say the whole thing feels like Microsoft is not sure where to go with it. It feels (to me) incomplete and so basic as to be meh. Square cells arranged in groups with live tiles! YAY?! I am not excited. Why does the desktop not now auto bias your icons to stay out of the middle of the screen but instead default to arranging your icons automatically like it has forever in the past, before touch? If I am going to be swiping in from the left to switch between all these glorious apps, and lets face it the desktop is here for a while weather they want it or not, why doesn't the desktop behave in a manner that is also touch friendly? Its all just so badly thought out and badly implemented. One wonders how this can be that one year into release windows 8 still feels in many ways like a beta product or an alpha pre release. I install 2010 Pro Plus and still must configure the built in windows mail client to use the share feature? The same is true if you install 2013's current offering. I mean its all just clunky and not connected, but as the Core apps go, they are not good and I don't think it speaks well for the "modern UI concept" as a whole.

My experience was that the RT, while less powerful and clunky, was a little more stable Core-App wise than the Windows 8 both on the Pro and the TPT2 though it had its share or random fails, quirks, burps and sputters too. With the Pro and the TPT2 (which I still use daily) the core apps remain flaky and subject to fail in any manner of ways at any given time they are loaded. They remain so bad that I mostly stay in the desktop. I just had to blank a directory the other day because my 26 apps were stuck at 'updating' but no apps progress bar would advance. I have already reset one device because this same issue became unresolvable and with no other choice to get the device back into production, I had to reset it. Try turning off UAC - good luck there.

For all those having 'no issues' all I can say is more power to you but your experiences are sadly far from the norm. For those having issues, I will tell what Microsoft will tell you after 30 minutes of Troubleshooting, Reset the Device. That's the new method for managing these devices, RESET. Ultimately Microsoft wants to be just like Apple, everything is an App, some documents can be put in places that are safe or moved to the cloud and then restored later. That's the new way things are heading. The problem is we are not there, or even close to there, yet.
 
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machistmo

Active Member
wow, this is unreal. they crash on me all the time. I think it's worse on 8.1 but it happened on the stock verson. i'll hold my breath until 8.1 RTM

To save you reading my quasi-rant:

RESET the device. Ease the pain, manage the hurt, RESET. I would do a FULL RESET.
 

dlacaba

Member
I'm using plain Win 8 and I find them unreliable at times as well. I find it is normally when I don't have an internet connection or when it's slow to connect. Then most Metro Apps just fail to load and even when internet connection becomes stable, you still need to close and restart the app.
 

Wayne Orwig

Active Member
How do you get them to crash?
I had a news reader freeze for a long time once when my internet connection failed.
 

Ruffles

Active Member
For all those having 'no issues' all I can say is more power to you but your experiences are sadly far from the norm. For those having issues, I will tell what Microsoft will tell you after 30 minutes of Troubleshooting, Reset the Device. That's the new method for managing these devices, RESET. Ultimately Microsoft wants to be just like Apple, everything is an App, some documents can be put in places that are safe or moved to the cloud and then restored later. That's the new way things are heading. The problem is we are not there, or even close to there, yet.

Way to dismiss the majority of respondents. If your core apps are crashing constantly, you've jacked it up. The reason why MS tells you to reset your device is because out of the box, everything works. It's the known good state. This is debugging 101. The surface hardware is a known constant. This is not like PCs with infinitely variable combinations of hardware that have never been tested together. MS spent thousands of hours testing this specific hardware and apps and they work just fine. If yours don't, you've done something to it to mess it up or you have actual hardware failure.

Most people don't HATE metro. It's just different. Give people the option to learn something new or keep the old and they will usually prefer the old just because their lazy. I call BS on your secondhand story on some neighbors father. If he's smart enough to be a hospital admin and savvy enough to follow technology and grab the update at launch to install manually on his machines, he'd be smart enough to understand what it was, how it was different, and how to work around issues he was having. He'd also be smart enough to see that Win 8 performance is better than 7 in almost every way and that benefit alone would far out way any inconvenience caused by a different start menu. If anyone truly can no longer operate a computer because the start menu changed, they have mental issues. All the hate for Win 8 comes from people that spend little to no time with it and are pissed because it's different. I've never read ANY reviews from credible people that put in the effort to learn it and then decided they hate it.
 
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