Most of the Windows crashes I've experienced since 2K shipped have
been hardware, usually RAM. System crashes still occur but they're
rare and when they do occur they're often driver crashes.

VMS was capable of taking hardware subsystems off-line (while keeping the
system up and running) when soft error rates exceeded a certain threashold.
Heuristic diagnostics, although only part of the diagnostic suite) turned
out to be very effective.

One area of
confusion is that many "crashes" aren't really--the keyboard or
display driver is hung while the kernel is still up and running.

So you don't consider the display driver in a single-user computer to be
part of the system? Even if you can't fault MS for the dispaly driver code,
it is the O/S architecture that enables that scenario.

On stability:

Secure memory management has been an afterthough in the Windows world. The
legacy of relying on applications to be good citizens is what system craches
and viruses possible.

By contrast, the VAX memory management architecture (the hardware
architecture) was specifically developed to enable secure (that is, a one
process can't access another process' memory data,code,stack) memory access
and paging.

-Steve


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