Very true Sim. I've used Windows since I was a small child and I know it for its lack of stability and insecurity. In fact, Windows 95, 98, and Millenium Edition are all known for their lack of stability, appalling login methods and abysmal memory management.
When I had 98 installed on my system it would frequently show blue screen errors, even though I had done almost nothing obvious to upset the KERNEL32 or SHELL32 memory areas. :bsd:
With Windows 2000 and XP, problems with memory management are not as frequent or severe, but you'll see that when you close down Internet Explorer, the file IEXPLORE.EXE will sometimes start hogging all of the system resources and I cannot figure out why this would be. Must be a sloppily coded memory base area. I've heard from one of my college friends that this problem is even worse in Windows Vista, with this happening more frequently than in XP or 2000. Worse still, if you're using a single-core processor with any of these systems you can do hardly anything while the resources are being hogged, and even when you open the Task Manager, it will stop responding for minutes at a time while you try to terminate the process, so in all it takes about ten minutes to release the system from this grip. This happens quite frequently to me when I close down various websites. Even this one, and it's such a pain in the arse to put up with, especially when it starts messing around, flashing, and causing my computer to lock up.
If I could install Linux onto this computer I would - but my mum's not too keen on the idea. Can't blame her really - it's her system, and she's used Windows for longer than anyone else in the house has.