At one time, I would agree with
you.
But, with the addition of SP2, constant updates, and a few frills/"security upgrades" M$soft has force fed us, my system has slowed down considerably.
It takes nearly a minute to cold boot, and almost a minute and a half to shut down from prompt.
The OS has gone from about 700MB to nearly two gig after all the updates ETC.
Not bad when you've got 130GIG of HDD space I know. But there has to be a lot of deadwood in there. And I freely admit, I don't know how to get rid of it safely.
Granted, for consumer use, XP is far better than any WinOS we had before. But still....................