I am no expert, and by no means computer savvy to the point that many of you sound, but just common sense tells us to stay the :cen away from any new microsoft product for at least a year to 18 months before even thinking about using it.
I upgraded to XP about the time SP2 came out, literally within a day or two of loading it on the SP2 dowload arrived, and have (to date) never had a failure on my machine that was not hardware based. Before that I was using 98se, which I had been working on since about 2000. 95 before that was working fine for me.
Incidentally I used to have a G4 powerbook as part of my package from a company I used to work in, and that was hands down the best machine I have ever used. But I could not get any software for it, so I went back to Windows. I know things are a bit different now, but even so...
Si
Si