I am deinately no PC expert, so I can't chime in here with much. However, my corporate issue laptop has been my daily workhorse for over 3 years, and I'm amazed at it's stability in spite of the pounding it gets- often with 8 or more applications running at once including stuff served from the Company Mainframe and Midrange, working from home over a non-MS VPN. And it's just a humble Compaq P-III 1.2 GHZ running XP SP-1 with 256 Meg RAM. There are also at least 3 security services running which I cannot turn off (Admin only). Although I find this rig very slow and overladen, it has only crashed once in 3 years, and that was a HD failure.

Could it be that WinXP is like a Diesel- it holds up better with extreme use?

Nahhh- probably not. My Company's IT Development shop just implemented an "Advanced PC" business case for themselves, in which they dumped Windows in favour of Red Hat- the main reason being that Windows Server does not hold up well in their production environment.

Seemingly, each of these systems- WinNT/XP, UNIX, Linux and Apple have their rightful place. For home use, it's a choice between WIN and MAC. For general office, planning, communication and customer service work like I do, I would dare say that Windows is the only choice. Apple doesn't have the Apps for this and Linux has too much of a learning curve.

Dave