imho the ONLY viable reason to get XP over win2K is if you have a CPU that supports hyperthreading, because XP handles that much better than 2K ...
also I heard XP has better power management for laptops (I will find that out mid july when I get my own lappy, so cant say anything about that)
imho 2K > XP simply because it has less bloat and crap I wont use and have to disable (some stuff aint that obveous to disable, do a forum search about how to disable the zipfile handling, okay I know how to disable a service, but still, a nice checkbox in some fancy gui would have been nice, hell, they like to put everything but the most common stuff in gui stuff, to get to the advanced usermanagement you have to type control.exe userpasswords2 in yer console .... in the console fer crying out loud, for something that just has an icon in win2K by default ... imho winXP does waaay to much information hiding, and hampers an effective in-depth management of your OS, when I'm on a winXP system I feel like I'm fighting with the Os instead of the OS helping me to Operate my System ... (the whole point it is supposedly designed for) imho MS has to offer two versions of their next OS, one for consumers that like bells whistles ... and gongs, and one for users that actually want to decide what they want to have in their OS of features ... or they could design a simple control application that lets you disable all stuff without going into registry hacking, or disabling services, because the average joe does not know how to do such stuff.
ohw, and I REALLY hate their bloody search assistant ... tho it's easy to shut off, it just gives me a bloody rage when I see it, I feel like i'm treated like a 5 year old when I see that, it's worse than clippy, and even more useless than ever before, because it does everything but bloody help u with your search ... (which you would think it's supposed to do cous it's called a search assistant)
but then again, as you have noticed, I'm quite biased, because I hate the whole winXP - lets do all the thinking for the users- idea, because it creates a whole next generation with a lower PC intellgence than the current AOL users, and guess who can go and fix their problems ...