(Thinks: Why am I defending Microsoft?)
LOL!
Perhaps because you are a fair-minded individual who gives credit where credit is due? Or should that be "less debit" where "less debit" is due?
As a matter of fact, I suggested Win2K rather than XP because the former requires less RAM and "grunt" to work reasonably well on older systems. If you have a Pentium 400 + with min 256MB RAM, then by all means use XP. Any less and my experience is that 2K is actually a bit better. There are also chipset drivers and BIOS issues with some older systems that the manfrs (not unreasonably) haven't addressed for XP.