As far as crahing the system goes, i have both a mac and a pc and I haven't crashed either of them once! The pc is running on Windows 2k pro, so you can explain that one away. the mac is just not crashable as far as I've seen. Of course one time I had to force quit a program that was not responding to me... But that wasn't necessarily crashing the machine.
I would love to get an SGi machine and a Unix OS one of these days. Just to see what that works well with and whatnot.