[Aiken]

About win9x family: it's much worse than NT family. In fact, it doesn't matter how fast your pc, win9x will always be slower than same system on NT. Unfortunately win2k is not designed for great game experience. So the only reasonable choise for gaming machine is xp. If you want to speed up your xp system, try XPLite. It removes all the crap from os and leaves is clean and stable (some may argue, though). There are bunch of tweakers, like X-Setup or TweakXP. Alternative shells (bb4win, geoshell, litestep) are a good choise if you want to get rid of monstrous explorer.