When I said "liar" I didn't mean liar as in intentionally decieving, I meant it as in "selective memory". All computer-based things crash. Hell, Sky Plus crashed yesterday in the middle of recording something! Could have been a surge\brownout, poor OS, poor recording algorithm, corrupt data or just a cow facing the wrong way in a field south of Norwich!
It may not be windows as such that crashed, it could be an application on it. I have recently started using my PC and iBook about 50:50 as I find more and more that the the iBook makes things easier to do. In that time, I have found that "windows" crashes FAR more often than my iBook (when I say windows, here I mean an application with Windows). Even at work, Windows did the whole crash, reboot and they claiming its a champion for "recovering" from the crash.
In this time, as I have said, a beta of firefox went down ONCE (and I'm sure that was due to some wierd use of something on Yahoo!Mail).
I appologise for any offence, as you said, it wasn't meant. I was merely trying to say that Windows cant hold a piece of dust to many other OS's when it comes to stability (beit OS or app based).
Now, as you say, this could be due to things outside windows hands, such as drivers or poorly written apps, but still. Any decent OS should be able to cope with whatever gets thrown at it!
As for keeping the OS tidy. I am ALL for that. I rarely install beta drivers, unless a game is not working on the latest. I have a good virus checker, I dont download things that I know are likely to be viruses (you all know what I mean
). I regularly check for spyware and so on. I even defrag regularly! I take care of windows, although I do push it. I dont really give it an easy time. I have plent open, often all in use in some way. Thing is - I treat my MUCH less powerfull iBook the same way and its perfectly stable. In fact, right now, I have Firefox with 8 tabs, about 4 Finders, TextWrangler, CyberDuck (FTP App), iTunes playing Xmas music and I recently turned it into a Apache/PHP/MySQL server. Apart from a slight lack of RAM (so paging is caused), its running perfectly (maybe a touch warm on my legs
).
Mac's also have thing "l33t" status that kind of flows around them. You VERY rarely see a "n00b" with a Mac. I can see why - Windows is MUCH easier to get to grips with because it simply does so much for you. Sometimes, though, you dont want that. Sometimes you actually want a little control. Mac does this in a nice transparent way (imho). For example, installing/uninstalling: In windows, you have to specify the folder by path. In MacOSX, you run the DMG file, then drag the App somewhere (usually the Apps folder (or subfolder)) and it does the rest for you. Similarly, to remove, drag the icon from Apps to the Trash. You have much easier control, but the OS keeps the actuall install to itself.
Anywho - enoguh from me!!
