Well bring home a copy of Win2000 and try it. I'm sure you will see no difference.
Oh by the way, where do you think I got my Win2000? My ex employer BAE systems is pretty big too, but their NT/Win2000/XP is just like everybody elses.
Those of us in the R&D department installed our own operating systems in our computers at work and in the development computers in the lab and in the machines we sold to the military. They were just plain NT4 or Windows 2000 installs. They didn't crashed either.
There is an enormous amount of bad software that gets installed in home computers. Almost every piece of hardware comes with a CD. Most of the time you are better off throwing away the CD. XP has drivers for most things and it's always better than the stuff on the CD.
Mice for instance don't need drivers. Every piece of software that Logitech supplies has bugs. It seems to be a "brand identification" thing with them
Throw it away.
I don't need to supply a driver for my real hardware modem (although Win2000 needs one). Heck I don't even need a driver for my Radeon 9250 video card. Microsoft's driver works well. That's more than I can say for my old Radeon 9000 and my Matrox card.
Another thing about video cards. Don't install anything but the driver. That "Power Desk" stuff is bad news.
Digital cameras come with CDs. Toss them out. They make lousy coasters because they have a hole in the middle. I wouldn't put one in my computer either.
You're apt to get CDs with optical drives and hard drives. Throw them away. Well I've heard the OEM version of Nero included with some optical drives is good. I don't know because I paid the full price (ouch) for the full retail version.
When you go to Microsoft's update site and they have a hardware update for you, it's probably a good idea to ignore it, unless you're having problems with that particular piece of hardware. I could tell you stories about Microsoft's hardware updates.
Most people don't run diagnostics on their hardware and don't check the temperature of their CPUs and hard drives.
Many install high powered video cards that run hot and cause problems.
If your machine is crashing, a little detective work should be able to pin down the cause. Running another OS will usually determine if it's software or hardware pretty quickly. I like the DOS memory diagnostics you boot from CD or floppy. Slax is good too. It's a complete Linux that boots from and runs from a CD. Installing another XP on another partition is also a good idea.
A good look at the blue screen can help too. Unfortunately XP comes with "automatically restart" turned on so you don't get to see it. You can fix that from System > Advanced > Startup and Recovery SETTINGS.
