In theory, WinXP is suppose to prevent letting software crash the OS and seeing the dreaded Blue Screen of Death and overall I guess I do see less blue screens then previous versions. However, software drivers can still crash the OS which I found out recently. It took awhile before I tracked it down to a buggy network card driver. WinXP detected my Netgear FA312 ethernet card on installation and even Windows Update didn't find anything more recent drivers. However, I was starting to see random freezes and crashes to blue screen with the message: DRIVER_IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. It took me awhile before I found someone on the web mentioning that he had the same problem and it was caused by a buggy network driver.
I went to Netgear's site and downloaded the 1.8 version of the driver and so far things look better. I'm mainly writing this to remind myself that if I ever had to reinstall winxp again to not forget to update the driver.
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