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Perhaps the "crap" you went through is due more to your skill level than Windows? Perhaps you spent your time surfing for porn and clicking on dodgy links in your mail? It's a poor mechanic that blames his tools....

False generalizations can go both ways.

I also have been supporting Windows for a long time, I started working full time in 1993, and most of the people whose computers I have fixed stayed fixed. I always take the time to explain to my clients what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what could be done to keep it from happening again. Most of the time it is malware or hardware issues.

Windows NT based OS's have never tended to self destruct like Win9x, and the situation has only gotten better with each release.

I've been using NT based systems since NT4 came out. I've had NT4, windows 2k, and XP systems all "self destruct". Not very often, but they have. I've also had machines that ran forever. Like my brothers 2k pro machine that has a 7 year old installation and is running perfectly smooth (I'm typing on it now). I had an nt4sp6a server than ran 24/7 for over 2 years before a hardware failure killed it (ran internal software, wasn't accessible from outside the network, so I never bothered to do updates. heh).

It all depends on how well you keep up with it and what you do on it. I've seen 2 week old towers riddled with viruses and spyware/malware because of users that don't have a clue. I've also seen REALLY flaky OSX installations. How users manage to do that, I don't know. I've never had issues with OSX

Windows /can/ be a battle. We have over 60 machines at work that are running imaging software that reload themselves after every reboot. Windows STILL, somehow, has issues from time to time. :/

While I have yet to see a recent production-quality OS going hara-kiri for absolutely no reason, software update systems are a new threat to system health. It's getting even worse since updates are done automatically or strongly suggested by an user-friendly window. You could argue that such systems are not self-destructing alone, but it's still a core functionality going wrong after a while.

Perhaps I have offended some computer god, but practically every OS I have used for a while went FUBAR at least once by an update. Fortunately, I can fix things up by my own, but it made me quite cynic when I hear claim on system robustness.

Anyway, there are so many variables in computer systems that most claims are really a matter of anecdotes based on personal experiences. Hey, I know users who were genuinely happy with Windows Me, yet it's the worst crap I have ever used! Well, actually, it's Solaris, but that's another story based on anecdotes...

It may be true that a poor mechanic blames his tools, but there comes a time when a good mechanic realizes that his tool really is broken and moves on to a better one.

For every "IT guy" or whatever it is you are that says stuff like that, there's another, like myself, that doesn't quite see the battles and struggles you do. Between XP and Ubuntu at work supporting over a thousand users currently, the systems are so stable that it frees me to worry about other things like growth, infrastructure and other things, instead of little issues.

So I don't see the "battle" you do. Having done this for quite some time now and going through 98SE, NT4, 2000, and XP support, I really have to wonder what you and/or your customers are doing to these computers.

Don't get me wrong, I love Macs too. And with Ubuntu I've really grown to like Linux again. But they're all just tools to meet an end, not a religion.

Try supporting home users, it's a different battlefront entirely than your corporate desktops. Regular users struggle with endless needless hurdles from poorly written and unnecessary third party software, problems with IE, and problems with Windows in general. I bring back a level of sanity back to their computers and reduce the annoyances they have to live through.

That's the funny thing though. I'm having some trouble with some "non-geeks" with their Macs but I haven't run into any trouble with mine. In my experience it's been the same as life on Windows.

I stopped paying attention to much of the Mac versus Windows discussions but occasionally don the my asbestos gear. Both Mac and Windows have been a battle.

I use all three operating systems daily as a developer.

I am certainly an expert with all of them.

Easily, Windows is the most troublesome, frustrating, and difficult to work with. I can't help but feel people like you, who claim Windows is somehow acceptable, have no real experience with the alternatives.