"Zootal" wrote in message
...

Back in the SP1 or so era, I found W2K to be unusable on a few of my boxes
because of the lack of drivers for some of my hardware. Specifically, I
had ATI Rage Fury cards in my box, and ATI was unable to provide stable
drivers for these cards. I had to abanodon it and go back to Win98 on
those boxes. Other compability issues prevented me from using Win2K until
later service packs came out.

But that pretty much applies to any OS, and it is not the fault of the OS.
Any OS is only as stable as the weakest driver. On this 64 bit Vista
machine, the only issue I have ever had in 1 year's use was with a buggy ATI
2600 driver. Yep, ATI again! I would get the "The atimmx (whatever it is
called) driver has stopped responding...restarting the driver" message at
random times. Sometimes it would recover, sometimes the machine would blue
screen.

This was purely a driver problem. Once I installed a different version of
the driver (9 months ago), no more problems. Vista is now as solid as 2000
or XP ever was. This machine gets pretty hard use - dual monitors,
multiple Virtual PC VMs (Server 2003, XP and Vista Business) running for
weeks at a time for my development job, plus the usual Internet/Itunes/Media
Player/MP3s/camera/pictures home use.

Most OS instability can be traced to either bad drivers or flaky hardware
(usually RAM, but can also be power supply or hard drive - I have seen all 3
cause random reboots). Particularly with the NT/2000/XP/Vista line. All
of these have been very stable for me, given solid hardware.

BTW, what does any of this have to do with Electrolytics? Topic Drift
Much? :-)