I have been using Win XPx64 for 3 years now. I honestly have to say that I only needed to reinstall when I changed my HDD. I also ran Linux in parallel, which crashed more times then my XP OS. I like Linux, mostly because of it's reliability when it comes to server usage, but I have stopped bashing Windows XP since I got on the XPx64 wagon. I will continue to bash Microsoft because of their policies, but I believe that as a desktop machine, a XPx64 will perform just as well if not better then Linux on the same hardware, and with out of the box config (I am comparing Ubuntu, and will stick to the user friendly parallels when comparing)