And what exactly do you mean by “beat it into submission?”
You may want to try Microsoft’s Windows Update site. There you will find bug fixes and security hole patches for Windows. Might help, might not. Worth a shot.
My home system is win98, on a celeron 366 running at 558, powered on 24/7. The last time it rebooted was because of a power failure a week and a half ago.
My car system is win98 on a k6-300. I recently rebuilt the entire system and I’m still working out some power issues. It hasn’t crashed, but it has spontaneously rebooted twice. I think it’s because I’m using a 140W inverter to power a 230W power supply (even though it shouldn’t draw anywhere near that much).
The secret to stability? Good hardware, and don’t run bad software. Stay the hell away from those cutesy programs that people send in email, and avoid opening MS applications.
I’m one of those lucky ones running Windows 2000 Pro on a 750Mhz…It hardly ever crashes. I leave my computer running when I leave at night and on the weekends too. I’d say it dumps on me maybe once every 3 weeks, and that’s maybe. I have had it happen to me twice that when I’ve crashed and re-booted I’ve needed to change my password- no “you have 13, 12, 11, 10, etc. days until your password expires, would you like to change it now?” windows, just “Your password has expired, change it now.” I thought that was neat.
I’m using Red Hat 6.1. It doesn’t crash. I don’t think it’s crashed in the six months or so I’ve had it installed, and the computer’s on all the time. My Helix Gnome XWindows has crashed twice, though. I don’t really know why. The computer is a 550MhZ Pent 3.
neutron star, I’m running Me at home. It’s WAY more stable than 98. And the reboot time is worth the price of purchase alone. I don’t think it’s crashed yet.
I run Win 98 on an AMD K6-2/550 w/ 320 MB RAM. It hasn’t crashed in quite some time. I run all kinds of software and hardware on it, and it chugs along reliably. The computer is set up for more than one user profile, since my roommate uses it too, and he’s not as judicious about what he downloads and opens, so I DO reboot it every few days just for the sake of stability. Between reboots, it is on 24/7.
Home: None in the last 40 hours. It rarely crashes. Powered on 24/7 unless I’m out of town. Running W98 on a P3
Work: Locks up every couple of days. Networked P1 running W95 and has a very full disk.
A) 0 and 0
B) Linux and Linux
C) n/a
D) 447.700500 here at work, 266 something at home
Memory, 128MB on both
Personally I find the idea of a computer crashing quite amusing.
$ uptime
5:53pm up 51 days, 1:01, 7 users, load average: 0.05, 0.06, 0.06
The last time I took it down back in November was to move.
At home, my computer crashes every one or two weeks. This is due, however, to the fact that I am running a buggy lucent kernel mod in order to make my winmodem work.
Mainly I don’t tempt fate too much with my ThinkPad. It’s primarily for personal writing and internet access with few bells & whistles, so I don’t need to run it on the bleeding edge. It’s running Office97, and the only major program installations or deletions I’ve done are mostly games. But it’s also been a work machine at times in a hybrid, dynamic environment, and it never once choked on any configuration changes.
Though it’s not on 24x7, when I do take it down for moving it’s just hibernated (hit the power switch and it saves its place perfectly). It goes through the hibernation cycle several times a day. I reboot it weekly.
The thing’s also got a hot-swappable DVD drive, and if I watch a DVD movie on it, I’m in the habit of rebooting afterwards. The DVD player software has on rare occasion made Win95 barf.
I keep the hard drive as clean as possible (I’m using only about two-thirds of the 5Gb drive) and clean up temp files on a weekly basis. I’ve also made sure that Win95 is the only power-management entity operating (I disabled all of the machine’s built-in power management options).
Never have had to wipe & reinstall Windows on the laptop. (Knock on wood.) But then I’ve had to do that on my secondary desktop machine only once since its original setup.
Love dem ThinkPads!
Five computers in the house, a dozen or so at work, all networked and up 24x7. Crashes are limited to one or two specific PCs about once a week. Got a mixture of W95 and NT4.0 SP5, with Caldera OpenLinux thrown in just to confuse things, and a variety of processors from PPro200 to Athlon 1G, from 32M RAM to 256M.
The PCs that crash most often are running various components of a Wildcat! BBS on a PPro200 w 32M RAM under W95 original version (not even the OEM “B” version), with 15 modems hung on it. My goal for this weekend is to get it re-loaded under NT. But it’ll never fit in 32M of RAM on NT.
W95 seems to work OK for a while, then slowly starts to self-destruct. On my home PC, it works great for about a year, then slowly disintegrates, probably due to other crappy software that gets installed (using bad third-party installers that don’t uninstall properly), then thrown away. If you don’t install a bunch of bad software on it, it seems to work great. About once a year, the registry becomes hosed, I reload from CD and I’m good for another year. But that’s only on the one PC. The others are fairly static and run fine.
Oh, all right. (I’m probably gonna screw up the curve or something, though).
Three times
MacOS 8.6 in all three cases; one time I was in the process of launching Win95 under VPC when it crashed.
a) The NetBIOS network got hung up with some kind of traffic. I use DAVE to enable NetBIOS on the Mac. When the network came to a standstill, I had an open window of a remote volume showing on the desktop. Result: interminable spinning wristwatch. Required Command-Ctrl-Powerkey to get out.
b) The second time I had Photoshop, Filemaker, Eudora, a text editor, and Netscape running. I’m not sure, but it might have been some nasty Java on the Netscape page. Actually, it could have been anything in any of the programs (even FileMaker, since I was editing solutions over the network that were served from a FileMaker Server elsewhere).
My computer is so powerful it leaves ozone behind when it crashes! 
OK, It’s a PowerBook, of the era they dubbed “WallStreet”: 300 MHz G3, 192 RAM, good backside cache, dual monitor system thanks to ixMicro’s Road Rocket card.
I could probably crash damn near anything, the way I work. I’m constantly jumping from one app to another, switching whenever the current process is taking too long and I get bored. I haven’t fully tanked the OS X Public Beta yet, but I’ve hosed it enough to need to restart to restore it to coherency. Could be my lack of expertise in X, though, to be sure. I’ve crashed NT several times despite using it for limited purposes only. (again I blame our crappy network for a lot of it).
About 12 times.
Win NT 4.0 Service pack 5 (Service pack 6 gives me the Blue screen of death)
Building my program with Visual C++ 6, where I get to the point where I am linking in several third-party ActiveX controls.
Microsoft Developer Studio/Visual C++ 6.0, Service Pack 3
IBM Thinkpad 600E laptop, Pentium 2 333, 196 MB RAM, 6 Gig HD.