I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. I agree with you that 8 has some problems with it, but I’ve had no BSODs in 6 months now with win 7. The only crash issues have been the responsibility of an individual program (which has known bugs), not 7. And 7 doesn’t lock up or whatever. Just lets the program crash and you shut it down and the OS runs fine.
I’ve had 7 Pro running on 2 topline HP PCs, since 2009, and no BSODs or app crashes, so far. It’s been flawless. These are OEMs, not upgrades. After 8-9yrs on XP Pro, it took a day to get familiar with 7, but I like it better than XP.