You're nitpicking. XP is NT 5.1, Server 2004/XP Pro x64 is NT 5.2. It is the same kernel, simply updated with 64-bit shoehorned in. And performance benchmarks don't bear out your evaluation as "far leaner and meaner - and faster - than Vista". It is MARGINALLY faster, as I previously wrote. Also, he has a Core 2 processor. He mentioned it specifically in his post. But the cost of upgrading to a quadcore is significant. No one said a dualcore would perform as well as a quadcore either.