I have just been floored by Windows XP

[JustAGuy]

I was fortunate enough to get a new Thermaltake Silent Purepower 480W Power Supply, Antec Case, Asus A7N8X-X motherboard, Athlon XP 2800+, 1.5GB of PC2700 RAM, and an HP dvd420i DVD burner for $70 (most of that was for the PS, the rest was a dump of 'old' parts from a coworker). 

This has replaced my old XP 2000+ with 512MB of PC2100 RAM.  I decided since I pretty much had all my data backed up already and since all the really important stuff was on a second partition to just move the drive from my old A7M266 board to new one.  I well aware that XP doesn't redect IDE controllers after it has one, and I got my immediate system reboot when it tried to fire up XP.

So I put my XP with SP2 integrated CD in the drive, booted off that started the install.  It detected my current install of XP on the system and asked if I wanted to repair it.  I said, sure figure I would end up back at that screen in 30 minutes telling XP set-up to format the partition and then install.  I was wrong.  The repair worked.  20 minutes later I was logging into my account. I used my USB drive to get the latest nforce drivers from NVidia, installed those and had the new network card, audio and everything else working just fine.

All my applications run without a flaw there isn't really any left over crap in the registry (it actually wiped old hardware entries in the registry).  I just had to download a few updates from MS that were release after SP2 and do a reboot.

So what I was thinking was a 5 hour reinstall of OS and apps turned out to be 30 minutes or so because the XP repair function actually works.  I'm really floored by this.  I'm happy, but I'm floored.
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Hey, I have that same motherboard. It was a replacement for a Gigabyte motherboard (which had lots more features). XP was able to recover easily from that motherboard swap without problems. That whole "Microsoft = Microsuck" stigma that is perpetuated by nerds (I say nerds in the nicest possible way, after all, I am one) is really hard for some people to get around. They think that Microsoft Windows is still as crappy as version 3.11 and 95.

I've used Microsoft Windows since 3.1, WFW, and higher, since they were introduced, with very few problems, and definitely no show-stoppers. With that said, XP Service Pack 2 sucks. It sucks HARD. I used it for about a day on the laptop I bought, before wiping the thing and starting fresh with SP1. There's such a huge irritation factor there, not to mention the whole anti-p2p socket hack they added to limit peer-to-peer file sharing (they claim it wasn't for that purpose, but we all know it was). I won't get into specifics, but SP2 really blows hard.

As for the motherboard: beware. The one I bought had sub-par on-board LAN, a LAN connection that would fail intermittently (so I stopped using it, put a 3Com 905 card in, pretty sweet). The on-board audio just failed last month as well, but where there's smoke, there's fire; the whole board might go at any minute, really. It could be that I just bought a crappy one and it's too late to return it. Other than the on-board failures, it works well. I have 1.5 gig of RAM installed with a Athlon XP 2100+ installed. Works well, enough.

Good luck with yours.