[m_eiman]

It was also the less stable. I discovered more than once the machine was completely frozen (blank screen, no keyboard or network response). Even a NMI couldn't change anything.

Sounds like a rather hard crash to me.

[einhverfr]

Not a hard crash because the computer eventually would recover on its own as load lightens up. It's just a matter of interactive tasks not getting the priority you want them to have.

[seclorum]

Were database transactions continuing while the terminal was non-responsive? Yes. Thus, its not really crashed.

[gaius]

Hmm. I remember back in the day, when the display driver could crash on an NT 3.51 box, but SQL Server would still be up. We treated that as a crash.

A machine that was not responding on the network is getting its database transactions from where exactly? It's crashed, even if the disks are still spinning.