The people love Windows XP 10135

"The people love Windows XP". Allow me to suggest otherwise.

Three different machines, each using XP and the same drivers for a particular printer. Two of the machines, when spooling to the printer, default to sending the data as PostScript; the third has defaulted to PCL5 or some such. Net result, despite all three using the same driver, installed within minutes of each other, only one of them gets print jobs done in a reasonable amount of time; the ones which defaulted to PostScript get the data to the printer quickly enough, but the printer takes excessively long times to convert that into printed pages.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of why the printer performs so poorly with PS files, the obvious question is why, given the same OS and the same driver, it defaulted to two different ways to format the data?

Then, of course, we've got the network. Got a machine we want to join the domain, so it can access all the goodies. Whoops, no can do; the machine has XP home on it, which doesn't do domains. Why? No technical reason whatsoever.

That's Windows for you, though... inconsistency and limitation, for no reason at all.