XP is fine, provided you leave in "newbie" mode and change nothing. If you try to change to many things, it gets real unstable real fast. I'm using the Pro version, with the official guide "for admins" by MS press and still the damn thing died... So, much like anything else MS has ever done, don't customise it, and use only one app at a time and you'll be fine. Oh, and make sure you use NTFS for both boot and data partitions, and make sure your boot partition is at least 4Gb, don't ask me why, but XP eats drive space. later jb