Those of you experiencing crashes in Vista may not actually have Microsoft to blame.

If you were an early adopter of Windows Vista, there’s a pretty good chance you became familiar with one of Vista’s coolest new features: an automatic crash reporting utility that will recommend solutions if and when they become available. Or to put it another way, if you tried running Windows Vista on many machines, there was a good chance your computer crashed. A lot. Even if the manufacturer had slapped a shiny new label proclaiming the computer to be “Vista Capable.”

Of over 1.5 million crashes they had recorded a whopping 479,000 were related to NVIDIA products and drivers. The runner up was of course Microsoft, and some of the others can be seen in the pie graph above. This graph is generated by the folks at Ars Technica, from a released PDF documentation. According this document NVIDIA drivers were identified as the cause of over 479,000 crashes, or just under 29 percent of all the crashes Microsoft logged. Microsoft’s own drivers follow, at 17.9 percent, and the “Unknown” category takes third place at 17 percent. ATI is in fourth place (9.3 percent) and Intel in fifth place (8.83 percent).

[VIA, VIA and VIA]