I've had branded PCs (my HP exhibited all sorts of bizarre behavior and the Gateway wasn't very reliable either including one time when the motherboard went down and I couldn't even get win98se to install on a compaq I tried out recently because they use a non-standard motherboard) that were seriously unstable as well. I think a lot of the problem might be win98 (with its severe USER and GDI resource constraints) although I haven't seen that Carrara is any more stable under win2k (surprisingly) or maybe it's the fact that I'm running a netbeui network. Or maybe Athlon chips suck contrary to popular belief (we've been running Athlon chips for years in our pcs instead of pentiums because of the cost savings and hoping that they are 100% compatible). I can't use XP just yet because it won't work properly with my existing netbeui network (it can't see the win2k fileserver for some reason even after I install netbeui by hand off the install cd). I also don't like the way XP appears to force you to use one machine as the bottleneck (er, gateway) to the internet; I don't want each machine dependent on the gateway machine's availability in order to reach the internet. I've had lots of other problems with pcs over the years like incompatibilities with various firewire cards (with one card my pc wouldn't shut down it would just keep on rebooting forever until I pulled the power plug!) and video cards (it seems like I can either get Lightwave behaving properly or Carrara but never both at the same time using the same video card and drivers!) and on and on and on and I just don't recall ever having problems like that with a Mac. I can hardly recall a weekend in the last 9 years that I haven't spent at least a little time working on the PCs (meanwhile the eMac keeps chugging along unattended). If macs weren't so darn slow and expensive and our fileserver wasn't pc-based (and my partner was willing to switch) I'd seriously consider going mostly mac for our little shop. Are you XP users (and especially the Athlon ones) out there able to run all day and do lots of work with lots of different apps without rebooting? That would be a nice change although at least the newer machines reboot fairly quickly!