Split from here.

Stop pulling stuff like that out of your ass.
My Win2k box hasn't crashed in a long time (if it did it was the fault of broken hardware, which had to be replaced) and runs until I shut it down/reboot it.
If your friends are not competent enough to maintain their systems, that's not the OS's fault. I doubt they'd be more succesful with any other OS.

Well...
i hate to go to this os arguing...
of course i use windows....it's the first os system to me...and though there are always some problems with something...i feel it's still ok...
but i mean counting on stability and security..
if a bad program runs on a os, and the program may cause system malfunction, then i think the os should have the ability to break it's course and force it to stop and in the mean time inform us..not just let the computer crash....
there's so many security problems in windows and no one can deny it and says that windows is really safe...
from my point...i think *nixes is more secure than windows...
they're just not so user friendly..

Edit: BTW, since you mentioned win2k...
i think win2k is secure but just too secured that some of the programs can't even run
perfectly on it.....
i think that's a huge problem...

there aren't so many people outside like to face a lot of settings, input box, and dialog box like any of us in this forum....

Where do you get those ideas from?
Seriously, don't talk about things you don't know stuff about.

A program running with user-priviliges shouldn't be able to crash an NT-family Windows OS.
(What you are saying about 2k doesn't make any sense at all either)

I don't want to appear as an MS evangelist, but you are just spreading FUD:

Key word "shouldn't"

I've certainly had XP crash on me in a user account.

another topic, but what's with all those freakin programs wtih NO administrative function (mostly games) that require an admin account to run? I"ve already blasted EA a few times, but the help drones don't seem to see what the problem is.

How do you know whether the crash was caused by one of apps you were running or some driver (which run in kernel mode where security restrictions don't apply), or a even a hardware failure ?

Recent games need to be run from admin account thanks to "copy protection" nonsense (some kind of raw CD access functions by default don't work from limited accounts, some copy protection schemes install their own kernel drivers, etc etc). Funnily enough, problem goes away with pirated copies, or even with crack applied over legally acquired copy.

I have had Steam ( Valve ) Counter-Strike 1.6 crash my XP box on several occasions. They blame the Creative Labs Audigy2 drivers. Whatever the issue, the machine never crashes with any other game or program.
Love those games.
In the past I even saw Age of Empires, written by M$, crash Windows 2000 dead as a doornail.
2K and XP are real stable. It is a riot that a game can bring em down.

I had Halo repeatedly deadlock a windows xp machine. Another "only one game does this" problem, gone with replacing radeon8500le with old geforce4mx, reproduced in another machine with same radeon. ATI fixed the driver bug causing this a few weeks after I sold offending card.
*Majority* of game-related system crashes I have seen came from buggy videocard drivers (and gee I saw quite a lot of them in S3 Savage4 days). If their tech support blames your soundcard, try reducing hardware acceleration levels in dxdiag or disabling 3d sound features in the game (recent Creative drivers have been remarkably stable here but I only have famous dreaded sblive value from 1999 and only play games comparably old on it).

Hmm, have to check on the video card thing.
I only buy Nvidia due to several bad experiences with ATI drivers.
Geforce 3 Ti200, lastest drivers from Nvidia.

Both ATI and nVidia have been known to introduce bugs affecting only old/deprecated cards in new drivers (apparently radeon 8500le was already "old" at the time I bought it in early 2003). Perhaps going back by a few driver versions could help.
I run drivers from 2002 on my notebook with ATI IGP320M, because anything newer was just getting worse (broken video playback, instability, glitches in opengl, etc; I reproduced some of that on non-mobile radeon 8500le too).