Alienware, haha. I checked out alienware a couple of times and seen the specs and the prices. A good pc there costs $4,000. For that amount of money anyone can build their own, making it even better than that of Alienware.
For the last time, dude...Alienware doesn't sell to people who build their own machines. Computer techies with plenty of time on their hands aren't their target market.
Anyway, XP runs much faster and is far more compatible than Win2k. Trimming off all the extra "features" is very simple. After all, most of those features have clear and easy settings available in the control panel and menu options (not to mention the online manual. Then again, most people don't spend any time learning their OS because, you know, the OS is such an unimportant part of the computer so you really shouldn't try to know anything about it, right?).
Although I dont use it, I've heard that Linux is very good because of very low resources. I would think that you need a knack for programming languages to use Linux.