Funny that the BSOD came up here tonight as I have had a whole load of BSODs today on 3 different XP systems. Actually they were working fine under Virtualbox until I upgraded Virtualbox and the crashed trying to start probably because of some driver error. I have now got them working but only by changing some settings in Virtualbox. However it does raise the point about how touchy Windows XP and I believe 7 can be about things like drivers.
My other beef about Windows is the fact that it takes an age to update it and you always need a reboot to make sure it's stable. My Linux systems may need rebooting sometimes but I have never found any update to require a reboot immediately in order to remain stable.
The other day I had to install some updates on my W7 Laptop which is an I5 with 4gb memory, it took some hour or more to download about 30 updates, install them and then reboot which took ages to both shutdown and restart because half the work is done during that time.
Then I installed a new Linux system which needed to installed about 250 updates (it was an old install disk) which took about 40 minutes from start to finish and did not require a reboot to complete the installs, only needed a reboot to pick up new functionality in a small subset of pieces of the system.
Actually as Kitz says XP and 7 can be quite stable, but that is true of most systems these days. My first question always to someone who says their system crashed is 'What did you do/change?' as it is almost invariably that whatever they did caused a previously stable system to fail, and my first comment about BSOD above just highlights this
Stuart