I know where you're coming from. I purchased an HP a few months ago with ME preloaded and decided to give it a spin before replacing it with either 98se, 2k or (as a last choice) NT. To my surprise I've found it at least as stable as 98se, perhaps more so, on an Athlon 1.2Ghz. Everything runs fine, so I'm reluctant to upgrade to XP...at least for the foreseeable future. Even though I'm a web developer, we don't plan on using .NET so I really don't need the new technology, especially in a home computer.

I used to upgrade soft- and hardware often, but in the past few years I've taken the approach that until I can't do something I need to do, I'll sit tight.