Just my 2 cents...

I think the reason that many guru's are turned off by XP is that many, if not most, are already on 2000. And other than a prettier interface, XP does not give you a substantial gain - either in speed or reliability - over Win2K.

If you were on NT 4.0, Win98, Win98SE, or Win95 it is a great upgrade. However, the downside of being an early adopter is that some of the drivers for hardware you have may not quite be ready for prime time. Although the XP kernel is very close to Win2K that many of the 2K or 98 drivers may work until one is available.