The issue with Windows was not its instability, it is with its design. Unless using Run commands and Command Prompt, every adjustment is layers down a context menu to open some control panel that takes an excruciating 10-20 seconds, just to appear, and Microsoft intentionally hid all the fine controls. While literally everything is solvable without rebooting-- reproducing, tracing, researching and solving it takes too long because of the system design. If the problem isn't appearing often enough to warrant investing the time it takes to do it right, rebooting is the only rational choice. The first thing every Tier I help desk operator instructs is to reboot (because it's in their script, and because 95 times out of 100, it does the trick). "But I already tried that," "Please reboot again anyway." They're not wrong. Rebooting is a terrible solution. It's just that it usually works, and it takes a lot less time than doing things correctly.
The primary modus operandi for that time was turn on your PC, work/game, turn off your PC. As Win9x was never a server OS, nobody treated it as so.
And when people whine about 9x being unstable they don't remember (or even never experienced it themselves) how awful was the hardware it worked on.
I "fondly" remember some combinations of hardware were a literally ticking time bombs, you never knew when it whould BSOD. Though by that time I had enough understanding what if I see CMSXXX.VXD failing it is the problem with a cheap ass sound card drivers, not Windows itself.
