The short story is that the excellent comments here have verified my inclination to steer clear of XP for the time being.

BTW, My flub on that Pournelle link, which must have been pointing to an ad. this may work.

It's nice to have the opportunity to do a fresh install of Windows and your aps, although it is usually some misfortune which presents the chance.

In my case, Win ME ran, well, differently after I put in a new 40 GB hard drive, 256 MB more RAM, and reinstalled the operating system from the 'Recovery CD'. Enough so that I gave the machine a new name to reflect its new personality - Antares, to correct my previous misspelling, an all-too-common occurance now that the laptop is my standard internet machine, the 166 being finally overwhelmed by MSN's latest forced software upgrades, both for their online service and the default e-mail client, OE. sigh. At any rate, if you've ever had to type on a laptop for any length of time, you'll appreciate some of my frustration with its keyboard, and my soaring typo rate.

Hopefully, most of my goofs are not quite in the same league with this from USA Today

Cardinal win fifth women's title by sweeping unbeated Long Beach State

Ouch!

In the final analysis, I've got my hands full with computers as it is (when my fingers can find the right keys), and I think I'm just going to blow off for now the whole idea of any OS upgrades, especially since I've got piles of work to get done.

My general philosophy has been to avoid upgrades for as long as possible. There's a lot of truth to the hackneyed old maxim that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. My Win 95 machine has given excellent service for well over 5 years, and a couple of my primary applications are several revisions out of date. albeit running now on a much faster machine in the 866 (about 12x faster on Max renders than the 866.) I still use CorelDraw 7, for example, and Max 2.5. I'd like to have the current versions of both, but I'd be looking at probably $1500 or more for the upgrades, and another learning curve and some loss of productivity while the why, where and how of all the new, improved features slowly replace their predecessor's well-trained synapses.

Here we begin to probe some of the 'hidden' hassles of upgrades. If the truth be known, I haven't mastered all of the features in the versions I do possess - In the case of Max, far from it, although I'm middlin' and always hacking away at it.

Mastery of anything doesn't occur overnight.

For many of us, proficiency with a slightly outdated version of software is preferable to perhaps enduring klutziness with its newer kin.

Pournelle encapsulates things well. Good Enough is his take on Computers and Life, and I'm inclined to agree. And there is the significant issue of cost, which isn't a consideration most of the time for Pournelle, but very definitely is for me, and I suspect most people.

Granny always advised leaving well enough alone. Pournelle chimes in with his own take, and the comments above, all point in that general direction.

Sooooo....I think I'll just ride for now with ME and learn to live with its shortcomings.

Thanks again for all the very helpful comments from Larry, Tom, McFly, SDG and SDAI-tech.

sp

ps. I've worked a fair amount with Win 2000 and NT and they crashed my graphics aps too, sometimes bringing down the whole OS. True, buggy drivers and/or network overhead may be at fault, but in one recent case, the IT department dinked around with my NT machine for months and it never was completely reliable. Usually I would just reboot rather than contacting IT since that latter option often entailed several hours of downtime with the end result that some tech would point the finger at Corel or Wacom.