XP actually works pretty well. The only real bitch I have about it is compatibility. If you run software meant to work with anything in the 9.x line (95, 98, or ME) or something old that works with NT 4.0 you might have trouble running it under XP. Older games are particularly likely to give you trouble.
Everything else you listed should be no problem. As others have mentioned, make sure you get one with a decent graphics interface. Many laptops used shared RAM for the video RAM. Games prefer dedicated video RAM and lots of it.
As for viruses and crashes, XP is probably less succeptible to these things than previous versions of windows. I’d recommend turning off a lot of the stuff that XP likes to turn on by default, like remote system management and that damn messenger.
Maybe this explanation will help. Microsoft used to have 2 operating system lines, the windows line and the NT line. Windows used to follow a nice easy numbering scheme, up until after version 3. Windows 95 is windows 4.0, windows 98 is version 4.1, and windows ME is windows 4.9 (or at least that’s how they identify themselves). Windows is backwards compatible to DOS, which is good because of compatibility, but bad because a really mucked up program can easily take down the entire operating system.
This is where NT comes into play. NT has a thing called the hardware abstraction layer, which prevents misbehaving programs from doing much damage to anything but themselves. It also royally screws with backwards compatibility. The NT line is NT 4.0, Windows 2000, which is really NT 5.0, and Windows XP, which is NT 5.1.
The main things that are going to cause compatibility problems are trying to jump from the old windows line to the NT line, and going from one major version to another (like 4.0 to 5.0). Minor versions (like 5.0 to 5.1) don’t usually cause much trouble.
The windows line is more succeptible to viruses, crashes, etc. because of the lack of protection mechanisms in the operating system. Microsoft also has no desire to support windows (they officially killed the line off with XP) so they aren’t making the security patches to them either.
And finally, wi-fi is just a wireless connection. You have a box that connects into your internet connection just like a computer would, and then the wireless port on your computer which connects to the box via radio waves. The actual internet connection is the same as you would have for a regular wired computer. All you are doing is adding a radio link in the middle so that you can make the laptop more portable.
