I would like to second proactive.

XP and 2000 are both good as far as M$ OS are considered good. For home use they are both fairly easy, moderately stable. I use Win2K at work and XP at home and find them both easy to work with.

One should note, however, that XP was tweaked considerably for gaming. So, if like me, you tend to waste time on games requiring lots of resources then XP is a superior choice to 2K. I have had problems with a number of games playing correctly on 2K or even causing core dumps occassionally. I have never experienced this on XP.

A final note, while 256 meg RAM is sufficient for either, 512 meg is even more sufficient. If you can putting in the extra RAM will pay good dividend on either system.