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Windows XP - my appraisal is...

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it sucks. A little while back I talked about how I had moved my laptop across to Windows XP and hadn't been impressed with initial usage and the modified start bar. Well it's now been a couple of months and my machine is crawling. In the next week or so I'm moving back to Windows 2000. I had moved my machine at home over to Windows XP and I was experiencing all sorts of weird issues, where the cd rom drive wouldn't always open when requested, slow shutdowns all sorts of weird things, with all the latest drivers, loads of memory etc. etc. I put Windows 2000 back on it over the weekend and it feels like I upgraded the hardware or something, it is just so much more snappy.

If I had to do it again, would I move to Windows XP? Sure so I could experience it, but now that I have, I'm not in any rush to put it back on. I'm not really sure what Windows XP gave me except a slower interface, less work are with the bigger titlebars and things. A status bar that scrolls running programs off the screen so can't see a new IM message etc. and a shutdown on my laptop that now takes about 5 minutes.

Comments

Gravatar Image1 - Okay, that's pretty much all wrong. XP is really not that bad, but you need to turn off a lot of the gee-gaws in order to make it useful to non-newbies.

First things first: put the darned thing into "Windows Classic" mode by going to the Start button and right-clicking, then going to Properties and selecting the "real" Start menu. Similarly, right-click on the desktop to change the Theme to "Windows Classic (Modified)". In Explorer, pick a directory and set it to View --> Details, make the Folders visible, then use Tools --> Options will allow you to set all folders to the "right way" of looking at the world.

Crawling ain't right either. Take a look at things like file indexing options, recovery points and so forth. Look at the services that may be running (from Administrative Tools on the Control Panel). Once you have all of the "save me from myself" stuff turned off, XP should not be appreciably different in performance from Win2K -- and you won't have to give up USB 2.0 support and a bunch of other stuff just to work around the frustration.

I hated XP when I got this laptop, but since I've turned off all of the XP-ness, it's been quite alright. I'm running the ND 6.5.1 client suite (Notes, Designer, Administrator), Textpad, Eclipse, MS Visual Studio .NET, MSDE (SQL Server Desktop Data Engine), Photoshop, Excel AND Mozilla even as I type, and I can't say that the machine is crawling (even though I will always want MORE POWER). It's been about a year and a half now, and I've yet to crash -- and I restart perhaps biweekly -- whenever I apply a new patch. Try a few of my suggestions before giving up. It's not that bad -- really.

Gravatar Image2 - My first WindowsXP machine arrived this week from Dell. There were far too many preinstalled apps. All junk. An hour after using the machine, I decided to reformat it. I always create a C and D partition, and install all programs to drive D. Now my icon tray only has 3 items, instead of Dell's 15. (sametime connect, anti-virus, feedreader)
Stan, Thanks for the Startup-menu and Theme tips.

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