Strange. I've just sat and watched the hard drive light on my Win7 machine for 60 seconds. In that time it flicked on a couple of times briefly.

I've got 120 processes running, including Skype and several other background services. I'm running two email clients, three browsers, a couple of instances of Visual Studio, iTunes (spit). There is even a copy of WinXP chugging away in the background somewhere in VMWare !

My Vista box is a little more chatty, but then it is running my webserver, hosting torrents, hosting a couple of Ubuntu installs under VMWare and running my Squeezebox servers.

I'm not denying that Windows doesn't hit the disk more often, it comes out of the box with a load of background services that most people don't need most of the time. But none of the Windows machines I run have even close to continuously active drives.

I suspect that you typically come in contact with Windows machines that are shall we say, in need of attention

And again, I'm not claiming that Windows isn't more skilled at getting into that state than Linux, because it is (with a little help from the user).