> driver quality varied wildly across hardware vendors, and installing them was often the change transforming a perfectly stable fresh installation into a crash

> driver quality varied wildly across hardware vendors, and installing them was often the change transforming a perfectly stable fresh installation into a crash-prone unstable disaster YES. 99% of BSODs are driver or hardware issues related. It's not that many things in the OS itself what can break so bad what you need to panic. But of course it's always Gates himself who wrote shitty OS.