Before that time frame, PC hardware vendors had little incentive to make stable hardware. It was easy to blame crashes on Windows. If the hardware itself made a

Before that time frame, PC hardware vendors had little incentive to make stable hardware. It was easy to blame crashes on Windows. If the hardware itself made a few crashes per week, that wasn't going to be enough to be noticed. The early 64-bit PC hardware was server grade, intended for NT and Linux. That set a standard, and then gradually people moved away from junk like Windows 98SE and Windows ME. Hardware bugs no longer had such an easy time hiding in a flood of software crashes.