Well not quite I'm afraid, as there have been a couple of power cuts, but as for BSODs, I haven't seen one of those since Windows ME which I'll be the first to admit was a quite unfortunate OS. I'm just saying Windows can be as stable as Linux, like my Slackware server box which has been up for the same amount of time, excluding reboots for kernel recompiles.

As far as the graphics cards go, I did find ATI's binary drivers pretty tricky for my 8500 although I got them working in the end. If it's just 2D he's looking for, I'm not sure there is much to choose between them,

Power cuts kill uptimes here, with 45 days being the limit :( Tho I do have a mandrake 7.0 box that has been running ever since that OS was released, aside from power cuts, originally as a desktop, but now as a print server... I don't have the same stability with XP, but then I tend to only use it now and then with heavy games that tend to kill it now and then - but not that frequently.

I actually had a very good ME install that was stable for 2 years as a game platform. The scandisk went nuts and wiped half the program files directory, and it was beautiful after that - tho a few things didn't work. Played games well, tho, which is the only use I can see for windows at this stage.

just bought a cheap card
 

i just did my system over for amd 64 althon 3000, my budget left no room for a high end card so i pick up a ati power color 9250 he didn't have any nvidia cards, running Fedora core 3, the ati hung up the linux on booting to the user window, it work on windows and runs my games doom quake battle field and mods, medal of honour, call of duty. the card has a thing where it switches the screen when the boot ends
kind of a draw back, even in windows, after looking through the forms, I picked a msi nvidia card fx5200series for the same price $64.00 cnd, and it runs both systems quite nice, the cards are almost equal in design except the drivers, For the money nvidia has more when it comes to thier cards, even in high end cards nvidia has surpassed ati in graphic engines, the pny quadro fx 4000 lists at $2395 cnd, the only card i seen higher was the 3d labs wildcat realism 800 for $2995 cnd. Now i was looking at a highend computer store, where you don't buy a $300 video card their stuff starts of at $600 and is more for the film and graphics industry, of coarse their might be even higher cards out there that i'm unaware of ? The ati cards only went to the $1800 range, I'm not in the film or graphics industry so i do have any input to the differences of performance, its based on you pay for what you get!

Just my $0.02: Matrox G450. It works, 3D and all, automagically with Knoppix/Kanotix and the mga module. No need to install any additional driver modules. I believe that you can still buy a G450 new.

Caveat for Windows dual-booters: my trusty Matrox G450 is not completely compatible with my Abit KT7-RAID (VIA KT133 chipset) motherboard and Windows (98SE and 2000). In fact, this was the reason why I switched to Linux in the first place. I eventually discovered that the motherboard's AGP aperture needed to be set to 4 MB, the lowest setting.