[jyl]

The various PCs I've used in the past couple years still freeze up, typically once every few weeks. These are quality machines - IBM laptops and desktops, Dell laptops and desktops, Compaq laptop - running Windows 2K and WinXP. Most were corporate machines, a couple were home machines. I reboot them every week or so.

Even more common are the application crashes. Excel crashes fairly often, once every couple of weeks. Outlook too. Word is better. Is it fair to criticize Windows for Office crashes?

My Macs seldom freeze up. I won't say never. Maybe once or twice a year per machine, I get the spinning beach ball that never stops. I typically never manually shut down/restart them, though they do get restarted periodically when using Software Update.

Although I will say my early MacBook had a firmware problem that caused it to shut down often, until I got the firmware update.