God, I almost trauma blocked the driver situation for that first year or three. My q6600 and 8gb of ram ran like greased lightning, and disabling Aero made it even more responsive than 98SE or XP. (I am a latency and user experience fluidity whore though, so sacrificing eye candy for performance was and still is A-OK with me). The Aero design language was still killer even with the bells and whistles turned off.

The main reason to jump from XP (or 98) was the 64 bit jump and breaking the 4gh ram limit. XP x64 was kinda hot garbage, also due to driver issues if I recall correctly.