Personally I've had very few problems with XP. I've only required 1 reinstall in almost 4 years. My PC is left on for days/weeks at a time without need to restart. I do believe hardware does have a large part to play with XP stability.

As for viruses etc. I would say in general it's far easier to spot a windows box that's been comprimised compared to a Linux/Unix box.

As for bloat... Well a 500GB Hard disk is £110... Who cares Although the majority of people using XP Pro really don't need it (they are simply paying for things they will *never* use)

Ultimately, there is no alternative anyway for the majority of users.

Graeme

Same with us Graeme. When our pc died recently, everything went starting with fan,cpu, hard drives everything by the end of it.

Now it's been rebuilt from the ground up, works great. Use XP at work and home, happy with it really.

My old laptop originally came with Windoze ME and this was a pile of cr@p! It kept crashing and i eventually got hold of Windoze 2000 proffesional which kinda worked alright.

But recently,i treated myself to a new laptop which came with XP and i think this is absolutely brilliant compared to the other types.I have used XP before (sisters/friends/work),but not explored it in any great detail until now.Much much better in my humble opinion!

thanks everyone this pc was built for me by a mate he originaly put xp on , then after he changed it to m.e i had to have a new graphics card but apart from that i've had no trouble with m.e.
i think i will stick with m.e for now but it looks like i will have to have xp if buying a new p.c.