Okay, unstable was the wrong term. The distro I was using, linuxcoin, proved to be fairly unstable FOR ME. No disrespect to the guy(s) who worked on it as it is great for many people.

Linux is just fine if you know what you're doing. I was mostly pointing to the fact that I don't believe there is a huge power savings and as noob I felt like I was led to believe there was.

Of course, there are added costs to windows rigs, licenses and drives. Drives are coming WAY down, especially the 30gb SSD's. Just bought two for $30 each and they use 2 watts at peak.

Didn't intend to start a windows/linux war. Linux just has driven me insane for months and I think newer miners should know they don't HAVE to go the linux route to be efficient. I lost more money with rigs that wouldn't run than I ever would have if I had just started with windows. Even if I had to buy the licenses and drives.

Just putting this out there for new miners, UPTIME is everything, the rest is negligible when you do the math. Yes, an efficient linux machine might costs $200 less(windows license+drive) but if it doesn't run consistently or you can't get it working for weeks, you've lost more than that already.

I estimate I lost about 300 potentially mined coins screwing around with linux. At current prices that is $1500. Had I started right away and bought 9 SSD's for my rigs at $99 each(64gb) I'd still be ahead since I have the licenses.

even if you buy 7 home premium when it's on sale at newegg for 79.99 and a $50 30Gb ssd that's $130 per rig, still would have only cost $1170 for 9 rigs.

Nevermind, you can sell the windows with a built rig down the road and the SSD. Not so much with used thumb drives.