Mac OS X, like all Unix-related operating systems, is terribly, terribly stable. To wit:

[Yakland:~] chet% uptime
12:23PM  up 47 days, 46 mins, 4 users, load averages: 0.14, 0.13, 0.19

Yup. Up and running with no reboots for any reason for a month and a half.

“But Chet, what about your applications?”

[Yakland:~] chet% ps -aux | grep Safari
chet  7965   3.3  9.4   747212  49384  ??  S    10Nov03 161:43.13 /Applications/Safari.app
chet  9993   0.0  0.0     1116      4 std  R+   12:23PM   0:00.00 grep Safari
[Yakland:~] chet% ps -aux | grep BBEdit
chet  2962   0.0  3.6   239568  18876  ??  S    10Oct03  93:37.31 /Applications/BBEdit.app
chet  9995   0.0  0.0     1116      4 std  R+   12:23PM   0:00.00 grep BBEdit

The date column is what you want to look at; Safari, easily the best browser I’ve yet used, has been running for better than a week. The real standout, though, is BBEdit, which is where I spend most of my time: it’s been running since October 10th. Try that with Word.