Angus McLaren at TechRepublic writes cluelessly:

Anyone who claims to hate Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS or any other operating system is not a true techie or network guru. You don't ever bash the OS, in fact if the OS crashes then it's your fault not the OS; Why didn't you make sure that it was using the right drivers, or the hardware is compatible or blah this and blah that, and so the list goes. Any OS crashes for a reason, not because it just feels like it. Compatability is there for a very good reason, why support something that is old when you need to keep moving forwards. Example, all leaded petrol car owners here in Australia can no longer purchase leaded petrol, they are forced now to use unleaded and an additive. Why? Because those cars are so old and they are few and far between now because unleaded cars are cheap enough to buy second hand as your first car. Get my point there?

I strongly disagree.

First only does Windows known to crash for installing bad drivers or incompatible software but also due to problems entirely of their own like memory leaking or resource conflict between their own approved software.

Secondly if an operating system is targeted only for the techies then much of the problem can be resolved. However windows is targeted for common man (or woman). It is impossible for him to know every intricate details of what makes OS crash like IRQ conflict or device driver issues. In fact most of the techies also know little about them. It is the responsibility of the Operating System to be robust enough to gracefully recover from such errors.

It is the responsibility of the Operating System to isolate user installed drivers etc. in a separate execution space or sub-system to prevent them from crashing the entire system.

Why does Solaris never crash? It knows how to recover from various error condition gracefully. That is how we define robustness. Get it Mr. McLaren?