>which os from Microsoft is the best? Is it ME, 2k, XP...
Though you're likely to elicit quite an argument with this one, personally I'd rank them as such: 2k, XP, ME. Concerned as to why? Well bugger off, since I'm too busy! Just kidding. Sorry, won't happen again.
I like 2k simply because it's NT without much in the way of fluff thrown in (unlike XP). Not to mention it doesn't have XP's horrid registration procedures and such. That's not to say that it's bad, necessarily, just that I agree with something that's so invasive of one's personal life. If MS wants people to register with Passport and keep an inventory of their hardware config, fine, just *ask* and I'm sure quite a few people would agree to submit such information. Additionally, 2k doesn't contain MS' little "extras": firewall (don't need it, as I have a dedicated machine to do this), CD Burning (I swear by a combo of Nero and CDRWin), [reduced quality] MP3 encoding (my Linux box does it faster). That's also not to mention the fact that XP has yet to be hardened, as it were. It's generally the consensus that with NT you wait until the first service pack is released before you upgrade. Granted, XP is mostly 2k's kernel, but that doesn't mean it won't have its own problems.
As for ME...ick. It's possible to configure it such that it runs moderately well but, face it, it's still the 9x kernel infrastructure. Likewise, I still run 98SE if it's necessary (old games and apps) because it's considerably more reliable than Millennium Edition (for me, excuse the pun, at least). That's also not to mention that you can add the features of ME onto an earlier version if you wished, as most of MS' improvements are mirrored in third party software.
So in conclusion, if you're looking for a general, home-oriented OS go with either 9x or XP (since the home version is geared more toward compatibility with older apps). I, personally, have a tri-boot of Win98SE, Win2k and Redhat 7. As I'd said, I use 98SE for the (few) old apps that won't run under anything else, Win2k for my day-to-day work (As it's ultra-solid. Uptime is somewhere in the month range now) and Redhat for my development tasks (it's also solid, I just happen to use Win2k more).
Wow, that was pretty long winded, no?