He probably has his own personal IT guy oncall 24/7, to fix the mess when it crashes,

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eMachines T5212.... Intel Pentium D 945 3.4Ghz..... evga 9800 GT 512 Mb PCI-E video card..... Realtec HD audio......2 Gb Crucial 667 Mhz DDR2 memory..... Lite on CD RW; DVD RW, DL,& Lightscribe optical drive...... Windows XP MCE 2005....... Antec Basiq 500w PSU......200 Gb Parallel ATA HDD.........Samsung 22" WS SyncMaster 2243BWX Monitor.

Actually in the early years, it was almost one a year:

.................... DOS ....................Based NT
1990 ..Windows 3.0
1992 ..Windows 3.1
1993 ................................Windows NT 3.1
1995 ..Windows 95 ......Windows NT 3.51
1996 ................................Windows NT 4.0
1998 ..Windows 98
1999 ..Windows 98SE
2000 ..Windows ME .....Windows 2000 Pro (NT5.0)
2001 ..........end .............Windows XP (NT5.1)

2003 ...............................Windows XP SP2 (NT5.2)

2007 ...............................Windows Vista (NT6.0)

Part of the long gap was that Longhorn which on which MS started development work in May, 2001 (XP was released in Oct, 2001) and was based on XP code, was scrapped in 2004. It had absorbed so many changes, that they started a new and based the new OS that according to Wikipedia was based on the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 code base.

Also found an interesting tidbit on Wikipedia, those of us who use XP know that the numbers that show up in the system panel are 5.1.2600.5512 (SP3), and the number for Vista original are 6.0.0.6000 and SP1 is 6.0.0.6001. One view of Windows 7 apparently has 6.1.6574.1. Maybe Windows "7" is really NT6.1 which would make it an upgrade of Vista in the same vein as XP was an upgrade of Win2000.

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Thanks to Solar Wings for the special siggy.