Are we talking about Win9x/WinME here, or real operating systems like Win2k and WinXP ?

A very good point. All anti-Win or pro-Mac people seem to run on the assumption that every single version of Windows is exactly the same, and bad. While I'm not a fan of Windows XP, the Professional version, in my experience, is almost as stable as Win2K.

As for me, it's Win2K on a Dell that I've been screwing with for a year and a half. It's no longer recognizable as one of Dell's machines. in 18 months, it has crashed exactly twice. And I am referring to real crashes here. Not one little freeware program that's not guaranteed to work not working. One crash was under WinME which came installed on it. I got rid of that quick. Home editions of MS OSes will always be utter crap. The other crash, under Win2K, was my own fault. I applied a Service Pack before upgrading certain hardware drivers (which I had received warnings from software to do), and it happened that the old drivers were not compatible with the Service Pack. And that wasn't a difficult fix.

I learned on Windows machines in high school; a trade school. Our lab was PCs, while the whole of the rest of the school was Mac. So I had a chance to play with Macs, too. I didn't like the feel of them back then, but now I have somewhat more justifiable reasons. Specific pieces of software and hardware being one of them.

Aside from that, Macs have always been like a home appliance, in my view. Plug it in and use it; don't mess around, and you shouldn't have problems. While this may be great for some people, I like to mess around.

So that means either Windows or one of countless version of Linux to me. But *nix OSes have always been intimidating to me, and so I'd need a strong reason to justify switching. My current machine is quite stable.

So I don't like Macs because of exactly what they try to be. The computer that you just plug in and it works (usually). I generally like things in nice neat little packages, but also do like a number of features (empeg comes to mind).

The thread shouldn't be a flame war. It should be a list of people's opinions. But while I'm here, let me just point out that I can't stand people comparing Macs to Windows. I'd give an anology if I could dream one up, but I don't feel that people are justified when the compare an entire machine (including OS and hardware) to someone else's operating system. PCs can be just as easy to use as Macs. PC does not equal Windows.

So let's not flame about which is better. One person has his/her reasons for using Macs; others have their reasons for using Windows or *nix. There's no point in trying to convince someone that the choice they thought about and made was wrong, simply because someone else says it is.