-NT4: Great, snappy, fast, reliable. No USB, no drives over 8GB, no DirectX
-98: Crashed a lot.
-2000: Stable enough, but did some weird shit with Zip drives.
- XP: Had ShadowCopy, but no built in application for actually making system images.
-Vista: Would restart itself whether the user wanted it to or not, in order to install updates. No good then for any long render, calculation or simulation.
- 7: I'm liking 7. A few niggles.
I use Windows because I use CAD software - and the reason engineers don't historically use Macs was covered by the first poster on this thread. When I have played with Linux distros, I did notice how much scientific software was available.
Really, if you need a program, then the OS is merely to launch that program. If I was a musician or a graphic designer, I would use OSX.