rise2it - 9:57 pm on Apr 8, 2008 (gmt 0)

I'll stick with Windows 2000 on most of my machines, thank you very much.

Here's my feelings on all of this...feel free to agree/disagree.

XP/Vista is needed for DRM (forced Digital Rights Management) on Windows Media Player, and Vista is needed for DirectX10 (for gamers).

XP is being forced onto some gamers on some new releases (Crysis), although there are workarounds to let these run fine on Win2K.

XP does startup/shutdown a few seconds faster, but that is offset by the fact it needs twice the memory to do the exact same thing once it's up and running.

XP SP2/Vista has a firewall (which only works one way, I think). I already use a firewall.

I've played with all of these configurations imaginable on different operating systems, and I still think the fastest, most stable systems are the ones running Windows 2000 with SP3, DirectX 90c, and IE 5.5 (IE6 is bloated beyond belief.)