This is not even close to being accurate. I jumped on the windows bandwagon after Win 3.11 was released, and it used to BSOD for *everything*. Remove a floppy while it was in use, BSOD! Divided by 0? BSOD! Win 9x blue screened a lot, but it was a bit better. By the time XP rolled around, there were only a very few things that caused the machine to blue screen, and in cases I can remember, it was almost a hardware issue, or a driver issue (which generally is not microsoft's fault). This is one of the main reasons Windows screams at you if you install a non-signed driver. They want you to know if you install something they didn't vet themselves, blame the BSOD on someone else, not them. Hell, nowadays Windows can restart the entire graphical subsystem if the graphics driver did something bad (and I've found graphic drivers are the main culprit these days)

I have never had any trouble installing Vista or '7' on anything, both seem to come up just fine and install w/out any additional drivers (though it is possible I could have just been lucky) but I have had the sort of trouble you are referring to installing Windows XP. Laptops haven't had floppy drives for a very long time, and XP setup NEEDS a floppy drive if you want to add any drivers at startup, period. Luckily, I had another computer and a CD burner, so I was able to just create a custom install disc. Still a real pain though. I really don't think this is an issue for most users. Everyone I know (non-techie) just buys their computer, and uses it until it "becomes slow" (either because it is outdated, or more often because it needs to be wiped) and then buys a new one.

While I generally don't care how my machine looks like, Trackpoints are awesome. You might not think so (and I respect that), but I am currently typing this on an IBM SpaceSaver II that was NOT easy to find, just for the Trackpoint (As an aside, if anyone knows where I can get more of these for a decent price, please get a hold of me). It's pretty much the ultimate pointing device if you aren't playing games, and are doing work (imho).

I wouldn't do that if I were you... Honestly, everyone I've ever known to own a Toshiba has been unhappy. Aside from the whole P4-in-a-laptop thing (around 2004, a whole bunch of their laptops died from overheating) everybody's complaint is the same: The bundled software is atrocious. So really you're not going to get much. Generally what I do is, I spend some extra money on an OS disc, and just wipe the computers once I get them.

They are not as much of a scapegoat as you'd think. They were originally government run, and then later "privatized". This led to a situation where they were still extremely (relatively) responsive to government policy (like buying loans to low-income families that were lower than their original standards to increase availability of loans) and had an implicit (now explicit) guarantee from the USG. This implicit guarantee allowed FM to borrow at a lower cost than its competitors, which allowed it to "crowd out" its competitors in the market for reasonably high-quality mortgages. In response, other financial companies began to "invest" (speculate) in lower-quality, sub prime mortgages. This is why it is very important for us (USians) to be careful about what we do now. Organizations we setup to combat this recession could very well do us harm 10, 20, (60!) years from now.

Where has this hate for the X-box come from? Isn't the X-box the #2 selling console? (#3 being Sony's Playstation 3??) Isn't Sony also losing billions of dollars on their hardware sales? And take it from someone who had one of those PS2s whose faulty lasers died right after the warranty expired, they aren't the first company to make a product that wasn't 100% bulletproof! Now, I don't have an X-box 360, nor do I want one. That being said, where is all this hate coming from?

Give it time... that crackpot still might end up being right :-/

Actually, a black hole at mars orbit wouldn't do any damage (to us) because if it swallowed up Mars, it would have the same mass as mars, thus leaving everything else untouched. A black hole on earth would well, not be enjoyable for us.

I haven't tried the latest 7000 build, but I did run build 6801 in a vmware instance and I was impressed.

While I actually like (and prefer) Vista, I can not deny that it is much slower than XP and GNU/Linux. From what I've seen firsthand, you can not say the same of Windows 7.