I've used Linux for longer than that...I can't think you are doing much with it. I've crashed linux plenty of times, just like I've crashed Windows plenty of times. All comes down to hardware. If you have bad hardware (like ram), the system will crash. If you have good hardware, it will stay up.

To that point, I've been running WinXP and Win7 for years now, on good hardware, and not a single BSOD.
And my linux systems don't crash when running on good hardware either.

It also isn't a backup if the data isn't offsite...which is beyond the scope of any individual hard drive.

Better link for you: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/5/18/

I would concentrate more on language breadth (learn a lot of them).
If you already have a grasp on C languages, try some non-C languages that do things very differently.
Namely, functional and dynamic languages. You've already covered procedural and OO (Java).
Lisp, Perl, Ruby, Python, F#, Scala, OCaml, JavaScript (JavaScript looks like a C language, but really isn't).

Outside of languages, more than likely you haven't learned OO concepts very well yet. Not your fault, colleges are notorious for teaching bad OO practices (I've only been proven wrong on this once). Design Patterns are another good topic to investigate.

The key to Microsoft's fortunes are in the Business Market, not the Consumer Market. Businesses buy Office, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, and Server products. Businesses pay for support agreements and the like. There just isn't as much money for them in the consumer market. So Microsoft doesn't put as much energy there.

Apple loves the consumer market.
Linux loves the business market.

Therefore: Linux is their biggest competitor.