This is one of those features that when you ship it, you'd better be doggone sure you're going to have a solid product out there because if not, everyone will know it.

 

Windows Vista includes a "reliability monitor" to tell you how stable your system is.  It even has a stability index value that shows how it trends over time.  Unfortunately, it's looking more like President Bush's approval ratings.  The first date it shows (2/17/07), Vista had a reliabilty score of 5.94 out of 10 - a less than impressive start.  On 3/18, it dipped to 1.01(!) after a steady decline.  The driver improvements clearly helps some -- i'm back up to 1.87 now (ooooo....).

 

To view your reliability on Vista, run "perfmon.msc" and click on "Reliability Monitor."  I'd be interested to hear others results. 

Redfin's CEO, Glenn Kelman, appeared in the April 2007 issues of Wired in an article titled "The See Through CEO".  The article discusses corporate blogging and how it's changing corporate communications for some companies.

 

Redfin is a very active blogging company.  Besides the corporate blogging that Glenn, Matt and Cynthia do, we also have local blogs for different neighborhoods in our service area that discuss the area and current for sale homes in that area.  You can check them all out at http://blog.redfin.com.

 

 

Redfin's been busy the past few weeks and the press noise overall has been pretty positive.  I hadn't had a chance to update on what's been going on.

 

There's been a lot of talk about Redfin and how our service compares against traditional realtors.  The top argument used to be that Redfin wouldn't get you into the home to see it.  Our "First Home Tour Free" program plus integrating open house times directly into our site helped us do better against that arguement.  

 

The next arguments were that you get a lesser service quality and leave money on the table in your deal.  The "lesser service" issue is one we know we do well against; we survey all our customers constantly to make sure we're doing well there.  A 95% customer satisfaction shows that we're doing well.   On the financial side, our team did a study of the past year's NWMLS sales data to find out how we did after a year with the Redfin Direct program here in Seattle.  The results were pleasantly surprising:

We published the results of the study and some of the details at http://www.redfin.com/advantage.  Take a read -- it's good stuff and further proof that the real estate industry is ready for and already able to see a change that benefits the consumer.

 

I've got to give kudos to the team for their hard work pulling this data together.  They weren't perfect in their data the first time, but they rallied to make sure it was right after 3rd party folks reviewed it for us.  What's funny is that the NWMLS itself had to retract it's published numbers because they were quoted by other agents as proof against our data and it turned out the NWMLS report was wrong. 

 

The cool factor in this whole thing I think (other than the fact that customers win more with us!) is that Freakonomics posted about our study on their site.  (Ed. note:  if you're one of the 10 ppl left that haven't read their book, get it.  It's a fun & fast read (and this from a guy who never can finish a non-fiction book!)

 

I've got to end with the Seattle Time's article title on this topic:  Redfin Revolution: In Competitive Real-Estate Industry, Redfin Model is Working.  That's just a great headline. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, clearly the ATI tuner drivers helped something.  I had a new record length of running without a bluescreen:  nearly 4 whole days!  Oooooo...

 

Now I've got a new culprit for last night's Bluescreen of Death:  "Probably caused by : USBPORT.SYS"

 

 

Clearly no customer should ever have to do this themselves, but since the Microsoft "Check for solution" button after a Vista Bluescreen was useless, I moved onto trying to debug the culprit myself.  It's been about 8 years since the last time I used the Windows Debugging Tools (and never had to for a personal machine; only when I wrote code.)

 

What did the Tools tell me?  Not a lot really.  Looking in the dump files that Windows generates on BSOD, the bluescreen I'm currently having daily appears caused by Windows Vista itself ("Probably caused by : ntkrnlpa.exe", "Probably caused by : win32k.sys").  I'm still guessing it's a driver that's doing it.  There was one instance (out of about 10) that was "Probably caused by: atinavrr.sys" which should be the ATI drivers.  I've got an ATI based TV tuner on this machine which shows up as "ATI Unified AVStream Driver" in device manager.   I think the card is actually the "Theater 550 Pro TV Tuner" but I'm not 100% sure.  Gateway doesn't have a driver for that card on their site, but they do have the Theater 650 drivers. 

 

ATI had updated Vista drivers on their site for the ATI branded flavor of the card, so I've now installed those and am waiting to see if stays more stable. 

 

By the way, it definately was the Sigmatel audio driver that was causing my Bluescreen headaches back when I first installed to this PC.  Looking at the original dump files in windbg (the debugger tool), shows "sthda.sys" as being the cause for all of them back then.  Good to know I made the right choice getting that hardware out of the system. 

 

Now we wait and see... we're at about 18 hours without a bluescreen since I updated the drivers, but that's how long between the last two bluescreens so haven't crossed any new milestones yet.  If we make it to tomorrow without another bluescreen, i'll be more confident that it might finally be fixed.