>Hi George,
>
>That would be great, thanks.
>
>If I go with XP, I'll have to give consideration to whether I think I'll do any web dev on it which would probably require XP Pro so I get IIS.
>
>One concern is that I've "heard" that XP eats lots of resources and one individual said running some games ( e.g. Combat Flight Simulator ) on a high powered Athlon resulted in the game running slowly. This concerns me because I really like CFS. ( FWIW contrary to some philosophies that seem to be set forth here, I have a life outside of tech development and working, including my family and other things :-) ) I'm trying to get enough input from different sources to determine if I think this case ( the slow running game ) is an anomaly or if there is something to it.
>
Bill,

I'll let you know. My son loves his machine (of course, he's comparing it to my old P200MMX), and he plays games on it.

I've got CFS98 so I don't know if I can give you a valid comparison (especially because of the difference between the two machines).

As for the performance, with a bit of fiddling, you can probably get more performance out of the box. Usually, they'll have some stuff that loads when you boot that you can get rid of. I don't know if part of the reason is the Windows XP theme. It's more graphically intense that the Windows Classic (that's what I've got set on my new machine). Further, when you say "high end Athlon", my questions would be which processor, how much RAM, free disk space, etc.