I had an old Pentium 90 that would crash on NT consistently. The diagnosis was a crappy bus that resulted in various errors.

Just for fun, I loaded Red Hat 5.2 on to the machine and it ran just fine. The syslog was full of bizzare errors, chattering the whole time too.

If something like Windows98 probably because of it not using the HLT instruction of the CPU vs. Linux doing the right thing, resulting in a cooler CPU on average when running under Linux.

See http://www.benchtest.com/rain.html

Reasoning by MS was low quality of the countless low-end power supplies, and maybe voltage regulator modules on mainboards, being 'unreasonably' stressed by load changes that fast.

I remember when I was using Windows 98, the media player [1] I was using is shipping with a tray icon which has a menu item written 'Save power when CPU is idle'[2]. It did exactly that (HLT thing). After ticking the menu, CPU just go cold.

[1]: 豪杰超级解霸2000 [2]: https://www.wendangwang.com/doc/e6d559d6f2cd9ba7007939d7/3