I had a pretty trouble free run with Win 98 but when someone gave me XP Home, I moved "up". The problem I had was that WP seems to look at a lot of hardware in a different way to 98. My old printer wouldn't talk to me and xp refused to recognise my old scanner. Many of my friends just went out and bought new equipment but I wasn't in there position. My answer was to split the tasks. My normal work which needs the speed and reliability of XP is all done on the main machine. I then bought a second-hand P3 computer for $50, gave it a bit more memory and I run the scanner on that. I got two network cards from my local shop bargain bin for $5, and a connecting cord which cost about ten.It makes my system a bit bulky but solves the problem. As for sound cards, the newer cards are all aimed at game players and can recreate battle scenes with great accuracy but how many songs need that. I got a second hand Soundblaster Live card for $30 which has all the features you could ever need. Cheap cards are ok for playing back cds but if you want to work with editing sound like I do, get the best sound card you can find and make sure it comes with its original cd