In reply to Indy:
You probably had windows xp. By 2004 it was probably working quite well on that kind of hardware. I dual booted the second generation of centrino chips on it. Since then they screwed up the interface with vista, and then got it a bit better with windows 7. Stability-wise things aren't too bad, but the problem is that it's still a dogs breakfast of an operating system. Drivers are a nightmare, they can still monopolise too much CPU time, windows people never see to realise this, it's so ingrained now that drivers are these massive pieces of software. Printers come with their own daemons that run all the time just to check for ink.
Then there is the software. Microsoft abandoned the common interface approach so that the new office apps are not intuitive to new users with experience on other windows (small W) software.
They'll be loads of entrenched windows users to tell me I'm wrong, but as a day-to-day non-windows user who has the experience of maintaining a mixed mac/windows/unix lab, modern windows is not an easy thing to move to. I could fix most things on XP despite not using it routinely. On I windows 7 I find network configuration beyond simple dhcp/static IP configuration non trivial.
