Despise HP. Building own new machine. which OS is most stable and easy 2 use?

[Quantum Flux]

I have bought a retail HP computer package about 9 months ago and it has given me problems from day one. I have found it to be slow and congested. I am an experienced computer user and know that this is not the way such a system should perform. I find that under the task manager there are about 60 unknown processes running and most are prefixed with HP. I'm sick of this junk and i plan on building a new system with huge performance and no junk software from HP.

I plan to build a computer with the following specs:
* AMD 3200+
* 1gb kingston ddr
* Two SATA hdd in a raid config.

My primary activity is video editing and i want a raw performance machine. I do however wonder which OS is best for performance but relativley functional. I am not farmiliar with anything but windows so i will assume that w2k is a good choice.

Is this a correct assumption and if so would you recomend all service packs?

 

[alvino]

Yeah, Windows 2000 is a pretty good OS. XP is ok, it just looks good.

 

[David Lindon]

Xp or if you know your way around some linux distros try them.