I'm really surprised that some of you are still using Win9x/ME.
WinME was the successor to Win98/98SE and was especially notorious for crashing and was not well-liked by most users.

Among this family of closely related Win OSes (i.e. Win95, Win95OSR2, Win98, Win98SE, WinME), Win95OSR2 was the smallest (occupied little hard disk space) and pretty reliable, and Win98SE was the most stable (among this OS family :-). WinME was the most bloated OS Microsoft has ever produced, and it was loaded with multimedia junk galore, very slow and very crash-prone. Stay away from WinME.

Now let's forget about WinNT 4.0, since device drivers for new hardware peripherals (especially video/digital camera, multimedia stuff) are almost non-existent for WinNT. You would be much better off with either Windows XP or Windows 2000 Pro (Windows 2003 exists but there is no Workstation/Pro version for Windows 2003. It's designed exclusively for server tasks).

Windows XP is very user-friendly, in terms of its ability to automatically detect and install device drivers for many new hardware peripherals (especially multimedia hardware). Windows XP has 2 different releases: Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional Edition. Win XP Home is not designed for use on a network (I mean a local area network or LAN), because it's intended to be used on a single personal computer at home, and its file system is still based on FAT32 (same as Win9x/Me family). Windows XP Pro Edition is intended for business users, where it has the ability to join a domain and network with other computers in a LAN (which translates into easier network resource sharing but with high security protection). Windows XP Pro also uses NTFS file system, just like Windows 2000/2003 family.

The main reason why WinXP/2000/3003 OS family is much more stable than Win9x/ME is thanks to the hardware abstraction layer used in WinXP/2000/2003. It abstracts the hardware differences from higher layers of Windows OS (thus rendering the OS more portable on different hardware platforms), while preventing user-space (userland) software processes from having direct access to the lower layer hardware. Think about having several applications (e.g. games) trying to take control of a hardware device (e.g. a sound card) simultaneously. Shared memory corruption is almost very likely. Memory corruption translates into crashes.

The NTFS file system used in WinXP/2000/2003 also contributes somewhat to the stability of these operating systems. However, the major advantage of NTFS over FAT32 is that it has some form of a true journaling file system (like Ext-3 file system in Linux), which keeps track of read-write transactions on hard drives, and so is much better in maintaining data integrity after crashes (e.g. power outage etc...). With FAT32, it's very easy to lose data on hard drives, due to crashes.

NTFS is also capable of supporting almost unlimited hard drive space. FAT32 is limited to 2GB or 4GB (depending on what OS you're using).

Eric