I currently work in the business and can observe the following with 5 computers at home for various purposes. I have settled on Win 2000 Pro currently as the best compromise - with active kids and their games being installed and de-installed Win98 became a basket case about once every 8-10 months (3-5 reboots/day to keep it running) It a lot of work to put everything back on a machine after a re-install. A recovery from backup won't work because the failures are often registry related or deadly mixes of DLLs from program installations. If you are not as actively installing and mixing products then Win98 may last you for a lot longer time than it does for me. I have machines that stay up a month at a time now after a year of service on Win2000. Sorry to be off topic but just wanted to share my experience because I am sure a significant fragment of the forum base also use computers :-)