"Microsoft's overhauled desk-top OS, Windows XP, has now been unleashed on the world. It's big and requires plenty of system resources ? it does run in 128MB, but only really becomes enjoyable with 256MB, a fast PIII/P4/Athlon CPU and a snappy graphics accelerator. On the other hand, there's no denying Windows XP is a very good general-purpose operating system. It's stable, fast, supports just about every kind of new hardware there is, and is backed up by mountains of Win32 software. But how does it compare to a couple of the rivals?
...It doesn't come out on top in every category, but you can't beat it as a general-purpose desktop OS. It's solid, it's fast, and does everything anyone could reasonably ask of it. Well, on new-ish hardware at least. For the anything-but-Microsoft crowd that's willing to put in some elbow grease to get things to work, Linux 2.4 with KDE 2 won't disappoint. They might have to boot into Windows to play the latest and greatest 3D games, though. Mac users can now boast that they, too, have a modern multi-user OS with pre-emptive multitasking and virtual memory handling. They will likely keep the copy of Mac OS 9 that doesn't have any of these qualities, though, until the software support situation for OS X improves."
