It's been my experience, in my 20 years of PC troubleshooting, that 9 times out of 10, blue screens are caused by third party hardware or software, not windows. Windows just uses the blue screen, as a way to report something is terribly wrong, be it anything from a bad stick of ram, to faulty video drivers.
Granted, Windows ME, and Vista, were complete crap and I'm not a fan of windows 8, myself, but 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, xp and 7, were very stable operating systems.