Originally Posted by cpx
Thats not a lie per say. Just two different creatures. I can expect a Linux(or any UNIX) box to run for days/months/years reliably and without crashing if you know what you are doing.
MAC is actually based on UNIX and works very well.
With wihdows, it may make you feel that you know what you are doing..
but thats far from the truth.
Note that I highlighted a bit of your post. That's the key to reliably running
any OS. I run Solaris, XP 64, Linux (Red Hat), Vista 64 beta at home and have run many others over the years (AIX, HP/UX, DEC...). There is no single OS that is light years ahead of the others for varied computing needs, so nobody should feel smug about running a certain OS.
The key is to know what you're doing and stick with the set up that works for what you're trying to accomplish. I am writing this on a box running XP64 that's been up for....oh let me look..... 6.5 mos. I rebooted Feb 13 when I loaded a new BIOS update. My Firefox browser is fairly stable but I'll be moving to IE7 at the gold release for XP64. Under XP32 I like Opera and Firefox. Under Linux I like Opera. My Solaris box hasn't been rebooted since Dec '05 (I was playing with leaning down drivers then.)
In regards to the speeding up of startup of XP, BootVis is an excellent recommendation.