I thin that talking about perfomance of 98 vs XP, you to know that using fat32 filesystem instead of ntfs on modern large hardrive (40 gig and more) is less rapid than on Fat 32. I think, that the only advantage of Xp vs 98se, his NTFS support and better compatiblity with USB and bluetooth... For old computer with 128 meg of ram and less, xp is slow, even with the nlited xp edition... 98se remain one of the best os Microsoft did, when using an old P3 733 with 98se and 128 meg of ram, my pc perform much better than with any gnome based linux distributions... I will rarely say something good about MS, but their old 98se OS was fair. And dont compare windows 98se to windows ME ! passing from 98se to Me is downgrading. Its' XP or 98 in case of yout sister computer! Last comment: MS does not car at all about powers users, MS phylosphy is to make software for dumb and clueless users instead of educating them. Why would I use Ms office ? to see the little animated puppy ?