"All professional/personal opinions will be appreciated."
With that in mind I offer my professional opinion that overclocking a P4 1.8GHz is really not required......achieving a stable overclocked system is very very difficult.....now it is easy to overclock your system mind you but to do it right where ALL functions operate without error for long continous periods is a long process of trial and error, remember that while 99% of your system might be operating flawlessly, that 1% might lock you up randomly and cause other glitches. (my Playstation emulator refuses to play when the AGP/PCI bus is OC'd)
Of course you say you are new at this so I do want to discourage you from experimenting, If you are doing this for the knowledge then by all means continue, if you are doing this simply to say you oc'ed your system, save yourself the time, a P4 1.8 is impressive enough.
Sorry to go on like that.........I would suggest Win2k as the hardware/software support is much more complete than XP's at this time.