In that case you're a lucky guy. I've heard others claim that 98SE is really good (wasn't there an article on that subject over on shell-shocked some year ago?) but there are precious few people of that opinion. In my experience 9x has more problems than good qualities. I've had it crash on me during installations and/or just after installations. I've had it crash unexpectedly during file operations, resulting in data loss. Come to think of it, I think I've had it crash on me in every imaginable scenario. I've had it suddenly lose settings, drivers and entire CD drives that worked fine at last boot-up. I've had it spontaneously set drives to compatibility mode and other strange things that only a reinstall will remedy. Its memory management (or lack thereof) forces you to reboot it all the time if you like running anything heavier than notepad. And believe me, my problems with 9x have never been related to viruses or malware and such. I've always been quite meticulous when it comes to stuff like that and I've actually never EVER had a virus.

Sure, XP is slightly slower but its performance can be tweaked a great deal. All the cosmetics can be turned off, unnecessary services and programs can be disabled. Networking and memory management can be tailor-suited to your hardware. Once you've beaten XP into submission it's not really that much of a difference. And even if it still *is* slower, I prefer stability over speed. I rather have a slow, stable machine than an ultra-fast machine that crashes twice an hour.

You go ahead and think it's just a matter of how people use 9x. I agree that not maintaining your OS and letting it become infested with viruses and spyware certainly won't do wonders for its performance, but i DO NOT agree to that making all the difference. The NT-based range of Windows is simply much more stable, well-constructed, advanced and secure than the 9x range. And that is not just an opinion, that's a simple fact.