[mixmastamyk]

NT 3.51 was rock solid, I had it on my desk and it never crashed once during the ~year I ran it. Which was a huge deal for MS in those days. Of course they chose performance over stability in 4.x moving display drivers in to the kernel. Thankfully it didn’t affect servers much since they could be run on vga/svga drivers.

[genewitch]

i ran NT4 from right before 98 until about a year into win2k's release cycle. I remember it never crashing, i think power outages were the only thing that ruined my uptime during those years. I had XP for a little while after win2k because of directx, but as soon as x64 released i was on that, and then 7 x64. My timeline for windows left me moderately happy with my own experience - but i did a lot of "repair" for 95-vista for friends, family, customers, and businesses.

Windows Millennium Edition, everyone!

[mixmastamyk]

Stability was heavily dependent on your display card and driver >= 4.0 until the recent past. It could be fine or horrible depending on how well the manufacturer did their job.

My memory is that 3.X could restart graphics if a crash happened there.

[genewitch]

could be, i never used 3.51