well, to be honest, I've been running windows XP for the past 2 or 3 years, and it's been rock solid no matter what (and I've gone through 3 video cards, 3 sound cards, 2 network cards, 2 hard drives, 3 mobo's, 3 processors, and 3 sticks of ram). I think microsoft just has a bad reputation from windows 98 and windows ME, because they would crash all the time, independant of any change in hardware.