Having the system hang is not the same as patching.

Keep in mind that Apple also makes the hardware so they can test the OS against their hardware. On a PC there are many manufacturers of many different components. By far, most of the stability issues on a Windows PC come from either 1) driver conflicts from different manufacturers or 2) driver authors not following the rules. One of the changes made in Vista, and carried through to Win7, isolates drivers in a way that makes it more difficult for a bad driver to crash the system. I outlined this change in a blog post here.

>I take your word that Win 7 is more stable than Vista. You mentioned Mac. Both of my kids have Macs for over a year. They didn't have - not even one time - that the system would hang. As far as I know (they are not technical at all) they didn't install any updates or patches. Their notebooks boot in seconds instead of PC in minutes.