Originally posted by cyberCLoWn
Haha!

XP is a good OS if you don't have *nix. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that XP is Microsoft's best OS out. 2000 is also very good (based on exactly the same kernel) although it's meant for a different market. It's like NT and 98 were never compared. One is for networking and server while the other is meant for home/office use (along with games).
It's not required but recommended that you drop the l33t attitude: "Haha! XP is a good OS if you don't have *nix."

Actually, Windows 2000 comes in a variety of editions just as previous versions of Windows NT did, including various server editions. Windows XP, Microsoft's upgrade from Windows 2000, comes in flavors suitable for home users and professional users (after the user gets rid of the Playskool theme). For the server side, Microsoft has released various editions of Windows 2003 Server; it builds on the Windows XP operating system. Longhorn is said to be a home and workstation version of Windows 2003 Server with significant shell modifications as well.

XP and 98 are radically different. The reason XP struggles to play legacy games is because those games run from DOS. There is no DOS when it comes to XP. Unlike XP, 98 runs from DOS therefore it's instability. XP uses the NT kernel which is much more stable and is totally unrelated to DOS so whenever u run a DOS based game, it has to run a simulated environment.
You're right: Windows XP is based on Windows 2000, which is based on Windows NT, which is based on OS/2, ad infinitum. Windows 9x/ME is Windows and MS-DOS thrown together, basically. However, NT versions of Windows run MS-DOS applications in a virtualization called the Virtual DOS Machine, which also runs Win16 (Windows 3.xx) applications using a modified version of the Windows 3.11 kernel that thunks Win16 API calls to Win32 API calls. Windows NT-based operating systems cannot, however, restart in MS-DOS mode because there is no real-mode MS-DOS that loads Windows as basically just another DOS program.