I might have agreed with you up to ~2 months ago (my 2 Win7 installs had been running for 3-4 years each) until a real, normal, official Radeon graphics card up

I might have agreed with you up to ~2 months ago (my 2 Win7 installs had been running for 3-4 years each) until a real, normal, official Radeon graphics card update completely hosed the install. Unusable and unrecoverable from the save point thing, whatever it's called. Sure, it happens rarely - but it really depends on your usage patterns. If you often have to try out software on a regular basis (I've always used Windows VMs for work stuff when I needed to evaluate things from $randomVendor) it might accelerate this. Or sometimes it's a piece of hardware. yes, some are 90s tales but to some degrees it has persisted.