>> When it first came out, it was legendary for crashing on people.
> 
> Really, do you have any references for that fact or did you just make it 
> up?

It came out around about the time I was at uni, and everybody was 
complaining about it. How it was so much slower, and how it crashed so much.

When I started work, we had no XP systems at all. We resisted using it 
as long as possible, but eventually we had to start using it. We had 
lots of stability problems with it. (And this is running on lots of 
different hardware, so it's not just one rougue device driver or something.)

However, as the years have gone on, it seems to have become more and 
more stable. Today it's so reliable that I can count the number of BSoDs 
I've seen all year on one hand.

>> The company I work for avoided upgrading to it for a long time because 
>> NT was so much more reliable.
> 
> Of course a new OS should be fully tested with all the existing software 
> before being rolled out, that's different to the core OS being unstable 
> and crashing though. 

> Wasn't XP based on the NT core?

Yes. Windows has gone through several "generations", if you will.

The first generation includes Windows 3.x and its ilk. That's not even a 
propper OS, it's just an application program.

Then there was Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME. They have a lot 
more features, but they're very unstable. (There are technical reasons 
for this, mostly to do with incomplete hardware protection.)

And then there was Windows NT. It added real security features (e.g., 
NTFS), propper hardware protection, and generally worked a lot better. 
The initial release was a bit buggy, but by the time you load all the 
service packs, it's very stable.

Windows 2000 uses basically the same kernel. I haven't actually seen 
many people use it, for whatever reason, and I haven't used it much 
myself either.

Windows XP again uses the same kernel, and adds a few more features. 
(Most notably that obnoxious blue plastic skin that I seem to spend half 
my life turning off...) Initially it was very unreliable, but these days 
it's pretty solid.

I'm not entirely sure, but I believe Vista and its twin Win7 have a 
fairly radically rewritten core. I don't really know much about it though.

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