On my parents' small laptop, Windows would just reboot. Even the repair functions of Windows would just reboot. No error message you could read, just reboot, repeat. Linux still worked fine (and my family is fine with using Linux, fortunately).

Linux also allowed us to quickly find out what is wrong with Windows: the hard disk is damaged (I like operating systems that give you useful error messages such as "Unrecoverable Error" on your harddisk). And most likely the laptop is out of warrenty since a month ago, as usual.

So I'm now investigating if the Linux partition also contains hardware errors, or if we might get away with just disabling Windows altogether for some time, until I get around to buy a replacement harddisk (and a replacement battery, too). So far, our experiences with Medion/Aldi/Tchibo have been rather bad. The TFT screen for the main computer is often flickering, but they failed to repair it in two attempts now. The MP3-CD-Player had stopped reading and the replacement didn't play MP3 at all. And the laptops batteries were crap (and why did they put in two small batterys instead of a reasonably sized one?), I know of a friend where the CD drive of that same model doesn't work anymore, and now our harddisk is dead with just some 11 days of use total (it was meant to be a portable system, and my parents have better computers for daily use at home).

If we buy a replacement, it will most likely be a so called "Netbook" with Linux preinstalled. These tiny systems often come preinstalled with Linux (because a Windows licence would increase the price by like 50%) and would fit our requirements pretty well. Not sure which one, though. Maybe an EEE.