It's a damn shame linux systems still use reiserFS. I've got several very negative critics about me using reiserFS on my machines. Thats why I asked for XFS support in the first place.
EXT3 will never really thrill you with performances, mainly because it's a file system designed to handle large data blocks. On a desktop, you work with smaller files and ext3 won't really deal that in a fast way.
XFS however has thrilled me in all dimensions. It's stability, speed, and usability for both big and small files make it a perfect mix. (Ok, if you move 200gb data at once ext3 will be faster.)
I got XFS On my pentium 2 box as well now, and I noticed a speed boost of about 15 seconds between XFS and reiserFS (in the favor of XFS). The total boot now takes 47 seconds.
edit: mikecindi, didn't know about the doc screamings. ow well. I haven't got any problems with XFS on / yet.