I got my first PC in July of 2001, when new PCs were still coming with Windows Me. I didn't know the first thing about PCs at the time. I had been using the internet at the local library to play chess online, and I wanted to be able to do that at home. So I went to Best Buy and bought the cheapest thing I could find, which was an eMachines with a 733 MHz Celeron, 64 MB of PC100 RAM, and a 20 GB, 5400 RPM, Seagate HDD. It worked for the most part. I assumed that having to reboot a couple of times per hour because of freezes and other malfunctions was just the way things were in the Windows world, and I was just happy to be online in my own living room. A friend (Sam) that I went to school with (who was always "into" computers, to the point of spending $800 for 8 MB of RAM in the early '90s), was working in the IT department at the place I was working at the time, so I headed over to his house to see what I could learn. He was running Windows 2000, had 512 MB of RAM, and had a 1 GHz Athlon Thunderbird. He didn't have any stability problems. He was a self-confessed "Microsoft fanboy", so he wouldn't say anything bad about Windows Me, but he also made it clear that it was no accident that he was running Windows 2K. A couple of months later I discovered MAME (which was awesome, because I loved playing arcade games when I was a kid). Some of the newer games like Mortal Kombat II would work, but they were slow/choppy. I'd heard a lot about RAM, and figured that maybe I needed more of that stuff (in reality, the slow CPU was to blame, not the low amount of RAM). I asked Sam if he would help me get more RAM. So he came over and determined what type of RAM I needed, and how much of it was supported (it turned out that my cheap PC maxed out at 256 MB [128 x 2]), but that was still 4 times what I had. So we went to Best Buy and picked up two 128 MB sticks of RAM (about $20 each if I remember right), and Sam installed them in my machine (I noticed how easy it was when I watched him do it). This improved things a bit, but had no effect on MAME. In the winter of 2002 I decided to try XP. By that time I'd learned quite a bit about computers, and felt comfortable installing it myself, but I had Sam on the phone while doing it just to make sure. After getting it installed, I was skeptical of the Yoshi's Island-looking GUI, but I gave it a chance. After using it all day and not having to reboot even once, nor having any other issues whatsoever, I was sold. After disabling the themes service (along with some other services I didn't need), and turning off most of the "Visual Effects" under "Performance Options", XP actually ran fine on that weak hardware; I had no complaints at all. In the summer of 2002 I was taking an A+ and MCSE course, and I decided to build a PC. I went to Best Buy and bought a large Antec SX830 case, and then I ordered the guts online (Athlon XP 1800+, 512 MB PC2100 DDR, ATI AIW 7500 video card, 80 GB Maxor 7200 RPM HDD [which I still have in use by the way, along with a 120 GB Maxtor that I bought a couple of months later; over 10 years of near constant use and they are both still going strong]. XP ran beautifully on that system, and I used it until I built a new system in the spring of 2006 (Athlon 64 3700+ single core). I'm still using that system today and it is still running XP. I've used Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8, and I don't like them at all (though I like 7 much better than Vista, and Windows 8 is a complete joke). As far as I'm concerned, XP was the peak for Windows, and it has been all downhill from there (and I doubt there will ever be another version of Windows that I like in the future).