Hi Paul, I've worked with computers for about 16 years now (longer if you count when I was still in school), so I am aware of memory leaks and the like. Yes, programs have bugs and can have memory leaks if developers are careful with memory management (the classic mistake is to malloc() but not free()). What I am after with this question is whether people have been burned by OS stability issues. Windows has gotten better over the years. Windows 7 is much more stable than XP. I don't have much experience with Windows 8 as I don't like the tablet style user interface. It would really suck to have computer issues in the middle of a race and have to resort to drastic measures to get the systems up and running again. Device drivers glitches, registry corruption and the like is what I am thinking of. Then again, I am guessing the mission critical systems are stripped down to the bare bones, so extra software other than what is necessary installed, etc... to circumvent these types of issues.