or how about randomly restarting because updates need to be installed...in be middle of a game.
I got burned by this one once and it really made me mad. My coworkers joke about how I like to have a million Notepad documents open. I open a new one up to take my notes on various things, and I'll have separate open docs for different subjects. I also don't reboot my computer unless things get terribly slow. So, it's not unusual for me to have 8 or more Notepad docs open, many of which have never been saved to disk (or, if they have, I may have made updates that haven't been saved).
So, one day, I've got all of this up and going and a Windows message comes up and says it's about to reboot my machine because of a software update. It killed all of my unsaved Notepad docs. At least with Word, it would save your unsaved document temporarily so that you could still track it down, but Word is too heavy of an app (with too much space used up by buttons and such) to have a million of them open.
Anyways, after that experience, I dug into the Windows settings and disabled the auto-installing of updates. But, yes, the default behavior can cause a reboot even if you were in the middle of doing something.
Recently I got burned again due to a similarly frustrating Windows-specific failing, though I am more to blame in this example. Again, I had a bunch of unsaved Notepad docs open. Well, my battery was running low. The battery bar is horribly inaccurate on my Thinkpad (like every Thinkpad I've ever owned and, I suspect, every Windows laptop). So it tells me I've got 45 minutes of life left, but then 5 minutes later it's apparently in critical mode and it's forcing my laptop into Hibernate mode. Ugh. So then I go grab my laptop charger and plug it in. Well, little did I know that the cord that plugs into the wall and into the power brick got disconnected from the brick. So I plugged my end into the laptop itself and thought I was good to go. I turn on my Thinkpad and it comes out of Hibernate, but now it's got zero battery life left, and it starts beeping or something and by the time I can find the power brick and what the problem was, it completely shuts off (not enough battery life to go back into Hibernate mode). So, of course, I plug it in and power it up and it's booting from nothing, so all of my Notepad docs are gone.
On my MacBook Air, these issues don't happen for a few reasons:
1) The TextEdit app (yes, I can't resist using it just like I use Notepad on Windows) auto-saves.
2) The battery meter is accurate, or at least I should say it lets me run on fumes. It'll go all the way down to 1% before shutting down on you.
3) If it does get super-low on the battery, it seems to always find enough juice to Hibernate. I'll open up my Air sometimes and it doesn't turn on automatically, so I know the battery went dead. I plug it in, press the power button, and after several seconds everything is back on the screen (including my dozen TextEdit documents) just like I left them.
I'm not anti-Windows, though. I like my Windows 7 desktop that runs Windows Media Center. And there are some things where I prefer how Windows does things. I used to really love the trackpoint (eraserhead pointing stick) that you can mainly only find on Thinkpads. I'm a touch-typist and very fast and I liked not having to move my hands off the keyboard. I never liked any touchpad I ever tried. After switching from a Palm OS Treo smartphone to my iPhone and becoming a huge fan of that, I decided to try a MacBook and my Air's touchpad managed to win me over. There are still some times when I wish I had a trackpoint, but then there are a lot of things where the touchpad (particularly Apple's large version of it and how well it's implemented into the UI) is clearly better.
