SimonG: Well, Vista was a good OS to avoid in the beginning.
I'm looking forward to Win8. Was very happy with Win 7 and even if Win 8 is only an improved version of Win 7 I'm happy.
Probably, since back then, drivers manufacturers, especially ones like NVidia, ATi that for Vista had to use the new WDDM, were still using their XP ways of doing things, and BSODs were running wild.
I've had only a few BSODs on 8 so far, all except one (which had to do with the battery almost dying) have been related again, to the GPU drivers. Running beta versions with not-yet-globally available OS isn't what you call stable.