I'm not 1000% sure about this, but I believe xp is based on the modular nt design which trades os overhead for speed (os is 1/3 faster, but slightly larger on your hard drive). NT and 2000 are based on this new technology, leaving behind the old monolithic os's where if one thing went wrong, it all went wrong, (also new technologies uses pre-emptive multitasking making it even more stable). With all that said, NT, XP and 2000 should all be about 1/3 faster than any previous os, with xp being the quickest on restarts (of which there are far less compared to 95/98). When I migrated to NT then to 2000 I saw this speed increase over 98 quite clearly.
Chuck (MCSE)
