Andy, agreed on all accounts. This has been my experience too, approximately.

We also distribute more or less 3000 Lenovo window-based laptops and 1000 OSX-based laptops to our users. They come with a standard software endowement, but users are admins on these machines and can change the configuration as they want.

Data I have and my direct experience tell me that:

1. Non techie users will most likely slow down their windows machine. Causes for this, accounting for almost 95% of all cases, are, however, known, at least as far as we experienced, and they are:
a. Insufficient amt of RAM to accomodate all running tasks that users end up having after installing a significant amt of software;
c. poorly designed software keeping power or RAM hungry processes always running;
d. Concurrent AV software some users install w/o knowing they should not install more than one at the same time.

And then, of course:
e. Virus/malware, which ends up being part of c., above, if you wish;
f. Hardware issues (n1 one being by far HDD damages, followed by faulty RAM modules) that cause the PC to look unresponsive for some time, and occasionally crash. That is also what users report as "slow" machine.

Interestingly:
1. Apple hardware is as reliable as the best Lenovo we have. Not better than it, though. Some Lenovo lines, such as the Edge family, seems a bit more delicate than the other more "corporate" lines. Faulty screens, keyboards, touchpads, batteries, PSUs, ram modules, occur just as often with Lenovo and Apple. But, my guess is that this is the best market has to offer and other brands would not perform as well. Interestingly, I can't seem to notice any worsening of quality since the transition from IBM to Lenovo, so far.

2. We do seem to have quite a few older Apple laptops (two years old, since we would not distribute Apple before then) who are brought to tech support because they are "slow". I do not recall fgures though, nor the identified causes for that. My best guess though would make me think the reasons are the same as for Windows machines, except for virus/malware. Which is, unfortunately, going to change and if we don't succeed in providing some basic education to non-experienced users, it is possibly getting bad.



I tried OSX as my main laptop experience and reverted to Windows 7 mostly because I never fully adapted to the different paradigm and got tired of being less productive than with Win7 without any actual gain. I consider this a personal thing and not objectively a limit of the OS itself, but I very much relate to your comments on Finder and window management in general. I did not use OSX as main OS long enough to speak from my experience directly, but it is true that we (well, not me in particular, but I get that info and sometimes get to play with those machines if I have time) see daily OSX laptops crashing and hanging. Users and the way these machines are physically treated (bad!) do play a role in that.

All this just to bring my personal experience. Not at all meaning anything in principle against or in favor of OSX, which, however, overall, I like.