Patrick Norton and Kevin Rose backup about me up about XP on The Screen Savers. They also mentioned something important too. A lot of people having problems with XP used the option to upgrade from an older OS. That can cause some conflicts. It's better to start from scratch.

Cable
2000/256

My notebook is on all the time. I do enable some power saving modes. The HD and screen shutdown after a few minutes. Of course mine is only a few months old and designed as a desktop replacement.

You don't have to register to download the software, but it will keep reminding you to register. Just like jc said, use a junk email address.

I can get you the serial for most of the MS products. I won't give you the software I use though. It's only a matter of time before MS finds a way to block it and making it popular would make them do it quicker.

WeatherPulse
http://www.tropicdesigns.net/weatherpulse.html

Unlike other weather software, this one doesn't install spyware on your system. It has realtime weather, forecasts and satellite images and video.

I use two programs for FTP downloading and uploading. Both have Windows Explorer style interfaces. I use two because I'm lazy. Each is set with a default server to connect to. Since I mostly FTP only with two servers, I have each program defaulted to one of the servers. Crystal FTP Free 1.0 Beta Set...

http://www.freshdevices.com/ Fresh Download is an easy-to-use and very fast download manager that turbo charges downloading files from the Internet, such as your favorite mp3 files, software, picture collections, video, etc. Unlike any other similar utilities, this software is 100% free, no charges,...

I've used: 3.31 95 97 Alpha 98 NT 2000 Pro ME XP Home XP Pro My Dad worked for Microsoft, so I had access to a various releases of the different versions. 3.31: Good for it's time. It's time is past. 95: A leap forward in GUI, but buggy. 97 Alpha: Looked like 97, more bugs. So buggy that the final r...