welp, between XP and ME, i'd choose XP. I currently use Win2K, and will not upgrade to XP for a while most likely, if ever, mainly because of the Product Activation. And that's only because I'm cheap. I would rather buy one copy of XP and be able to install it on all of my computers at home. This is really the only thing Activation prevents you from doing, and I don't blame Microsoft for trying to enforce their licensing. If you really plan on only installing it on one PC, you are allowed to change up to 6 pieces of hardware every 4 months before having to reactivate. That's not too bad really. Buy a new video card, sound card, and DVD-Rom drive one month, and then a Cd-burner, more RAM and a bigger hard drive the next month, and you're still good, so long as you wait two months before doing anything else.
my computer has been giving me lots of problems lately, just with buggy type stuff. right now i'm running a scandisk and tonight i'm gonna run a defrag, maybe that will help. i really want to install windows 2000 because i think that will take care of a bunch of the stuff. there's also other stuff going on, like its telling me there are all sorts of hardware conflicts, even though everything works most of the time. i'm just afraid to try to fix anything, because whenever i do that i end up causing even more problems. oh well...
you'd probably be pleasantly surprised how much better your computer would run if you installed win2k from scratch.
did you know that according to the Fair Use clause of copyright law, you are allowed to make a few copies of software for personal use. Basically Microsoft is breaking this law by not allowing you to do this. but anyway....
"copies" as in backups, not as in copies on other computers used by the multiple people at the same time.