>> XP is far snappier than Win2K (or even 98) once you've tweaked it.....
>
> A common misconception among the users of XP

Nope, proven in A-B comparisons on identical hardware. Some people think
because old OSes are smaller that they must be faster but it's just not the
case any more.

The driver initialisation routines in particular in WinXP are dramatically
faster than in Win2K resulting in almost half the bootup time. Win2K does
have a slightly smaller memory footprint but that's about it. Even Windows
Server 2003 is faster than Win2K. The only other possible way in which
Win2K could be perceived as being faster then WinXP is if 'system restore'
is enabled. Disabling that is as simple as ticking a box if you prefer
speed over safety.