Adventures in XP

I have just bought a laptop. It contains my first version of windows XP.
I dislike the entire concept of product activation and have avoided XP so far.
The laptop however had no choice of OS (OK I could have either XP Home or XP Pro).

XP so far has been less user friendly than Mandriva or Ubuntu.
It tries to be helpful but limits you to dumb choices.
I am having fun getting it to detect my WiFi network.
It seems to assume that all other machines on the network are XP as well.
So score it down as does not play well with others.

I have been forced to manually power the machine down to kill an app – something I have not needed to do in Linux.