[Arralen]

I would advice, instead of re-installing every other month, do a clean instal once. Afterwards you should simply take more care about what you're installing on you 'puter, and that it is properly protected by firewall and virus scanner.

You now, I ran my Win95 (without any a,b,c) for 2,5 years, without any problems, and the only time I got bluescreens was when a faulty device driver screwed up the system. After changing it to another one, every was well again. And I had lots of software, games included, installed, no problems whatsoever.

Than I switched to W2k over 2 years ago, and again the box is running without problems. I even have done several beta test with it, (de-)installing lots of software and patches, never encountering any serious problem. As it turned out during these test, the P2/400 box with 384MB and SCSI drives run circles around some Ghz-machines other testers used. Why?

Because it runs only those programs and services that I actually use and need, and not a whole lot of 'funny stuff'.
I do not use/install all that multimedia crap, like half a dozend different video/mp3 players from questionable sorces, or "desktop enhancements" which interfere with even the most basic programs because of sloppy programming.

Handed the box to my wife now and build me a slightly faster one from 'spare parts' lying around. Again, did 2 beta test on it (WinSPMBT included), and did not encounter any of those problems which fill the forum atm.