May be my last question!

[kadeng]

I also vote for windows 98.

Never had real prob. with it.

I will use it as long as pos.

[cwk9]

I would say it you have the hard-drive space to install 98SE and XP. Avoid ME like the black plague.

[seth27_us]

i would go with windows 95, it is my favorite

[gstudios]

i run win2k pro, on a 7200 rpm HD; and 512 mb ram. And it seems just as fast if not faster, than when 98se was installed on this machine.

XP blows. Installed it, and not 10 minutes later it crashed. I wasn't doing anything. I have crashed win2k a few times. Mostly during games. Which sucks. But other than during games, it has been very stable.

And as for reformating. The way I do it is (since I end up having to reformat without backing stuff up, cuz i forget) heh.
I put all my apps on a seperate drive than C:; sure i still have to reinstall the apps, but i don't lose the executables, when reinstalling windows.

[Kitara]

Louie made me laugh. XP is quite annoying. If you were thinking of buying XP, think instead of buying 2000. It's nice and stable. I haven't had any major problems with XP either, but it keeps wanting to update crap all the time. Every time I think I've disabled it, something else comes up.
If you're networking, might want to stick with 98. 2000 seems a little slower to me, but maybe I haven't learned all the tricks yet.
As far as reformatting 3 times a year, a little tip for you. When you have all your programs freshly installed on a clean OS use drive image and make an image of your hard drive on either another hard drive or another partition. Re-building your OS with all your programs will take 30 min compared to numerous hours depending on how much software you use.
With all that said, you could leave the dark side and join the linux force. Be free of Microsoft! It's too late for me, I'll never be able to leave.

[bquine]

Also depends on what you want to use it for. If you have a decent rig and want to flex it a bit go 2000 or XP. If you are just a power user then 2000 is probably the best bet. If you want to use it for games and stuff or you have other people using it, then best bet is XP.

If you go for XP, make sure you hardware is compatible though. XP is very piccy with older pieces of hardware.

But in any case, nothing really wrong with 98se(if you can get past M$).