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FWIW, and I'm the classic Mac fanboi, that's possibly not Windows 7 causing the crash. HP has gotten to where they make some bad computers, and their underlying software is atrocious.

Please understand I'm saying this as a Mac guy, but part of the problem with Windows is frequently crappy hardware. XP and 7 are pretty good operating systems.

I completely understand. The motherboard on my laptop has been replaced 3 times in 7 months, and the current motherboard has lasted about a month... so it very well could be the hardware although the current problem is different. Part of the problem is my dislike for all or most things Windows so I tend to blame everything on Microsoft when the problem may very well be hardware. I'm not a Mac fan either. Got a Mac Book Pro and it sits doing nothing.

FWIW, the laptop is a Toshiba and my last Toshiba laptop from 2001 is still running although I've replaced the drive one.

My desktop is the HP (running Ubuntu), my other desktop is a Compaq (64 bit Vista) and the other is an HP (32 bit Vista)... all of which means HP anyway. I've only had hardware problems with the new Toshiba.

My server running Fedora was something I built from Newegg which has had no problems at all, it was just expensive to build because I can't buy in bulk.

It's interesting how everything works or doesn't work out for all of us.

Depends on the computers you buy.

I’ve got four Dell desktops (all of them cheap and cheerful but they all have awful onboard graphics cards - the card in the media center is so abysmal it can’t even obtain a 3dMark rating which is pathetic for a system that’s only five years old).

I have had 3 HP laptops for work and they’re all business grade - and are fantastic (the Elitebook is just excellent).

Best quality laptop I’ve ever had, bar none, was a Toshiba Satellite Pro 490xcdt, a work laptop I was given after it had passed its five year birthday.

By 2008 (a few months shy of its tenth birthday) it still had no dead pixels, and the original battery was still holding a 40 minute charge. Amazingly, it totally spanked my oldest Dell tower - a P4 3.2Ghz system with stock parts and only a RAM upgrade - in a benchmark test.

I sold it to a student who’s now a year from graduation and is still using it on a daily basis, XP + OpenOffice.

Some years back I compared business grade laptops and Dell certainly deliver more bang for buck than anyone else, but the build quality was nowhere near as good as the Toshibas and HPs. They’re fine if you’re only going to use them on a desk but if a laptop can’t survive serious punishment (e.g. a five foot fall from a shelf in a server rack, onto a solid floor) then it’s no use to me.