MS has eased up a bit on what you can do with your machine with XP before you have to phone home for re-validation. So that's not really a problem. I think you can even reformat and all that good stuff. I'm not on a network, just use XP at home so I have no thoughts/info/rants on networking with XP vs Win2K. Oh, I got mine from Dell with XP installed. XP already 'validated' or whatever it's called. XP is very very stable. I have only (only?) 512 megs of ram but have never run into any problems. If you let it, I do, it can use a lot of memory for caching. I use Explorer in thumbnail view which is so fantastic it's worth getting XP just for that...especially for us graphics types! And it caches everything! But whenever I need the memory, voila, it's there for me. No problems...I really like XP. Spit