A Review OF Windows XP By Jesse Smith slicer69@hotmail.com http://slicer69.tripod.com/ Wondering if the hype was true about the newest of the Microsoft family or if it was the dud security sites made it out to be, I decided to test drive Windows XP. A friend of mine has had a copy for a few months now and swore by it. In the last three or four months it has crashed only twice, he says. Sounds pretty good. Of course I can say the same for my copy of Windows 98, so I'm not too surprised there. This week I sat down at his computer and starting my testing. The following contains first my positive views of my eXPerience. I will then point out the things that I think need fixing in Window XP. Okay, first the good news. Windows XP, as my friend said, doesn't seem to crash. Once its up and running, you can leave your computer on for a few weeks without rebooting. A nice change. I'm sure than many businesses will enjoy the new improvement. I also discovered that Windows XP has a nice multiple user setup. This allows you to have several users on the same system. Each user is pretty much blind the fact there are other users. You can even start one program running, log off and have another user log in without the first user's program stopping. Everyone has their own documents and files which may be shared (or not) as seen fit. XP also keeps all users (except the administrator) from running Windows Updates. Patches and system changes can be done only by the admin. Windows XP comes with (of course) Internet Explorer 6.0 and several other Windows apps that you'd expect to see. All of these seem to work quite well. Great work there on the part of Microsoft. I didn't see the "This program has performed an illegal operation..." message even once. Nice change. Some features like the control panel and file bowser are now setup to be more user friendly. This grates on my nerves, having used previous versions of Windows, but for new users, I think its a nice change. I was also happy to discover that contrary to popular belief, Windows XP will run DOS programs. I didn't get to test any previous Windows applications, but its nice to know DOS still works. Telnet was very nicely redone. It now comes in window or console based flavors. Quite nicely done. Alright, now its time to drag out the things I didn't like about Windows XP. This is (of course) only my opinion. Others may see the following differently. I noticed that every bloody time I opened a new application another ad-window popped up. This probably comes from being connected to the Internet. I have to say it was an annoying feature to see all these ads while trying to browse my files. Also, Windows XP comes with MSN Explorer. Now, as I said, XP allows you to set up different users on your computer. Great. But if you run MSN Explorer, you also have to setup those users on the browser. So you have multiple user accounts on MSN Ex under multiple XP accounts. Not a nice thing to do to new users. I just said the heck with it and used Internet Explorer 6.0. I noticed that IE 6.0 looks very Mac-like under XP. Under Windows 98 this is not the case. A hint to Microsoft, if I wanted my web pages to look that ugly, I'd buy a Mac or use Netscape. Windows XP as you probably heard has more security holes than a fish net. So install those patches and get that fire wall. XP comes with Norton Anti-virus. Norton failed to detect any of the viruses I downloaded and scanned, so don't trust it too far. With such poor results from the scanner and the OS in general, they could have at least provided a fire wall. Windows XP doens't come with a copy of command.com. No surprise there, but I wish Microsoft would put that back in. No OS is complete without a command line. XP is very slow. Bloody effing slow. Running on a machine with 256MB of RAM, a 800MHz processor, no applications running and lots of drive space, it still took too long to do anything. Popping up a window took a second. Opening a menu took a second. Selecting a menu item and waiting for the menu to disappear took more than a second. I'm running a system with half the resources and it runs a lot faster under Windows 98. I think Microsoft should review what is taking so long. I imagine it's all the pretty pictures that clutter the screen and all the nice colours. That's another thing, having large "pretty" pictures all over the place might be nice for new users, but not for anyone who has been at this for a while. Windows XP also takes a lot more room on the hard drive than I think is necessary. About 1.5 gigabytes, which is about five times what Windows 98 takes. Sure, there's more stuff, but it clutters up a lot. I have to say that Windows XP is very user friendly. You can do everyday tasks easily. All great. However, when I went to change my screen saver or window colour or mouse settings it was like running through a maze. This was made more difficult by the fact that the control panel has a different look and feel. There's an option to use "classic" views, but you have to find it first. All in all I found things hard to find coming from a Win98 back ground. To be fair I suppose that a new user without previous OS eXPerience would like this new setup. So it's neither good nor bad. All in all, I have to say that XP came out better than I expected. However, its security (or lack of) along with the complete performance loss and intense graphics is going to keep me from upgrading. Probably forever. For a new-to-computers user, its a great system, but for people who can point-and-click with the best of them, save yourself the money. You'll just have to upgrade your hardware while your at it.