I got my very own first personal computer from Gateway in 1991. It came with Windows 2.0. Then Windows 3.0 came out and I upgraded. Woohoo!
Years rolled by, my computers morphed into different animals as I replaced and upgraded parts, and eventually I upgraded to... Windows 95! Woohoo!
Like a million other consumers I must have assumed that blue screens of death and other mysterious problems were just part of life. People would write funny haikus and stuff, remember?
Around 1996 I started getting interested in making HTML pages. Then I got interested in writing CGI scripts. Then I got interested in web/database programming. I had a shared web hosting account on a Unixoid system and wanted to simulate that environment, more or less, on my development machine and learn more about all that stuff. Over time, I tried several Linux distros and FreeBSD 4.something. Each time I got a little closer to a fully functioning system, but were problems too difficult for me to surmount, and I gave up and stayed with Windows.
Once upon a time, around 2000, I was doing PHP/MySQL development on the computer I had bought from the now-defunct Quantex Systems. It was running the OS that it came with: Windows 98. I was trying to run a reasonable code editor, a browser or two, a MySQL (database) server and Apache (web server). I had a lot of physical memory, but things just kept crashing, and I naively wondered what was wrong.
There is undoubtedly some precise technical explanation of what was wrong, but the high-level, plain English explanation is simple: Windows 98 was a piece of shit junk consumer operating system that was never intended for serious work of the sort I was attempting. I vowed that someday I would leave this abusive relationship and never go back.
I finally did it about three years ago: got a fully functional Linux running. I don't do Windows anymore, I extremely rarely crash, I can do everything I need to do, and my wife -- who is not technically inclined -- can sit down in front of it, browse the web, process words, etc., without knowing or caring whether it's Linux or Windows or something else.
I am never ever going to buy another PC with Windows on it because there is no reason why I should pay for that crap, and neither should you. I have friends and family who struggle with Windows spyware and viruses and I tell them they don't have to put up with that if they really don't want to. Nobody is obligated to put up with Windows anymore. You can get a Mac, or a PC with Linux pre-installed from somebody like Monarch Computer, or even <gasp!/> install it yourself and be happy. I'm serious.
In addition to Monarch Computers, I recommend Emperor Linux (http://www.emperorlinux.com/)for purchasing laptops with linux. They basically buy machines from OEMS and rebrand them with your favorite flavor of linux. I guess there's a windows tax involved, as I assume that the machines had windows at some point, but you never have to see it. May I also suggest this as a way of avoiding windows:
www.apple.com