They key word here is "small". The complexity of managing a company grows at an geometric rate as a function of employees. The complexity of a project grows at an exponential rate as a function of the number of developers (at least after you get past a handful of people). Small companies that don't produce quickly die. I work at a medium-sized company where the scaling issues I described above really apply, so even though it's a good environment and management isn't a hindrance to making things happen, there's no way I would say work gets done quickly. However, the work does get done, and the environment is such that I feel like I can really make a difference. This contrasts to when I worked for a large company where I felt like nothing I said or did mattered in the long run (even though I did really good work for them.).
It sounds like you are in a good situation, and I hope it stays that way.
I very rarely saw XP crash in a way that wasn't obviously attributable to a hardware/driver issue. Vista blue-screened on me a couple times, but I stopped using after about 2 months because it was such a turd. Windows 7 was better, and Windows 8 is too, once you do what you can to eliminate all the "Metro" stuff. Both of them are still slower than XP in my experience, especially when copying across a network to a Samba share, which I do a lot. But blue-screens are almost a thing of the past in my experience.
Good day to avoid cops. Crawl to work.
