Maybe you should take into account that I'm not an IT manager. Also, I usually do a bunch of mods to a standard XP install: Turn off System Restore, Virtual Memory, indexing services, and such. But in regular use I don't really use windows anymore, but when I did I either used 2000 or XP and with the latter I would back up and reinstall the system every 3-4 months, just to make sure everything ran well . I also never needed anti virus, if I ever got a virus I just reinstalled the system over it.
But seriously, Windows XP out of the box has very poor memory management. It resorted to virtual memory on my Dell XPS model 1 even though I had 2GB of RAM, a whole 1GB which wasn't even put in use until I nixed virtual memory. USB stick writing was also a lot slower than on my Power Mac G4, which when I did the test was using 10.4.
I also had to constantly rebuild NTFS due to power spikes out here in the boonies (yes I have surge protectors, but cheap ones, I cant be bothered to spend $100 on a good APC), I eventually hacked my XP to run on exFAT which was much better
But I have never had to rebuild an HFS+ volume due to power spikes, although the spikes have all but disappeared after new power lines put in 2005 after Ernesto.
