You buy an OS from Microsoft, and it sucks, so you're going to spend $200 to buy another one, and in 3 years when you realize XP sucks too, you'll spend $300 for Windoze 2003. Yay for rewarding MS for making sucky products. XP sucks about as hard as any other version of Windoze. I just got to do a total reinstall of Windoze XP for my parents yesterday because half the services on the computer refused to start any longer, giving me an ever-so-helpful 1068 error. Their computer has printer problems too; the printer spits out blank sheets of paper between every real page it prints, and half the pages it does print are half-blank. But that's not the reason I had to reinstall the OS, it just imploded.

One issue involved in the move is that some of your old software is likely not to work because XP isn't very backwards-compatible with old versions of Windoze. You're also likely to need more RAM, due to the bloat of XP and the resources it hogs. Any time you try to do an "upgrade" in Windoze, things are almost certain to break in exciting and unexpected ways. I wouldn't even dream of attempting an upgrade. I'd format the harddrive and install the new version of Windows from scratch.

If you feel like blowing a couple hundred dollars though, go for it.