> When I was managing those Macs we were still on the last iteration of MacOS 8
> and the Macs used to "decay" at a very similar rate to the PCs running Win95 and WinNT4.

I never had that kind of problem myself, but then I ran a very streamlined system and didn't run too many extentions. A print bureau I used to work at would reinstall their systems every six months or so, but stuck rigidly to 7.5.3 which was probably one of the most crash-prone releases ever. I finally encouraged them to upgrade to OS 8.1 and they found the systems much faster and far more stable.

Did you run Norton Utilities or similar on the systems by any chance? I found that caused more problems that it fixed and if useless utilities such as filesaver were enabled, the system would get slower over time.


> We brings me to MacOS X, which although I haven't used it, I am sure it suffers
> from few of these problems. I also hear that it's config data is in plain text file
> (or XML at least) ?

All the Apple stuff is in XML (they inculde an editor in the dev tools too), the BSD stuff is usually plain text.