Yes, indeed. +1 to OSx... because it just works, year-in and year-out.
Any issues experienced are always way less worse than the Windows experience and it is usually me (the user) who tinkered just a little too much as the real reason why OSx needed to be re-installed. Out of the box OSx and not interfered with is a blessing to smooth business operations day-to-day.
... and when you replace the hard drive with a "SATA2 DDR2 HyperDrive5", the swap memory bottleneck practically disappears. http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/
Nope... It's the kind of solution you get when the developer has more time available and wants the code to consume a different resource; more Heap than Stack. It is slower because you are managing your own container in the Heap and not leveraging the PUSH/POP of registers, but this is outweighted by the massive advantage of being able to consume as much Heap memory as the OS will give it. It will aslo make the code more compatiable / portable to run in different modes; everything from 8bit EPROMs running in virtual memory to the latest 64bit OSs... all you really have to do is port and compile without really having to answer the question of "Will the compile parameters be big enough? (stack size)".