WinXP - The First Weekend

So you fancy an upgrade and are using Win 98 or ME and you're not sure how to go about upgrading the operating system your PC came with. This is a summary of what happened this weekend when I took the plunge.

I purchased the Upgrade edition of the Home Version as I thought I could happily live without the extra features designed for network systems. My copy cost $99 (£60ish), no that's not a typo, being based in Italy at the moment means either ordering from the UK or buying it at the American Naval Facilities here.

Preparation. The first thing I did earlier in the week was to download XP drivers for the major components of my PC, so Detonator 28.32 WHQL for the graphics card, the new Soundblaster Live! 5.1 drivers from Creative made it onto the PC, VIA 4-in-1 for the motherboard (it doesn't care what OS you use) and I decided I'd grab the printer & scanner drivers once I was sorted, but XP detected & installed them correctly during install!

Install. I wanted a clean install and was keen not to suffer from upgrading over the top of WinME, and having problems later. So I copied both Windows & Programme files into a directory on D: so I could import e-mail, address book and so on at my leisure. Then I simply booted from and emergency bootable CD I have with essential tools on it. You can also boot from your Startup Floppies that Windows creates when installing 98/ME, if you don't have a bootable CD; the main advantage is the CD is a lot quicker to load than a floppy and can hold lots of utilities & driver files making life easier.

There is no rocket science involved in making a bootable CD, both EasyCD & Nero support the facility, all you need is a bootable floppy which it then copies in a special way to the CD making it bootable. You have to make sure that booting from CD is enabled in your BIOS, all PCs released in the last few years support this. So, once the CD has booted you are faced with a DOS prompt, into which I typed "Format c: /q" the "q" does a quick format which simply tells the OS there is nothing on a partition, so all the old data is overwritten, rather than clear every single block which takes forever. A quick format took less than a minute on my 6Gig boot partition. When that is complete, switch to your XP CD and reboot.

The Upgrade version, which is a lot cheaper than the "Full" (though both have exactly the same files onboard), so it makes sense to save you money for the important things in life, like beer. As soon as things get going, the XP CD it asks for a qualifying product, in my case Win98 (my WinME disk is also an upgrade version - cheapskate!). YOU Swap CDs as requested, it checks that you have 98 (or whatever version OF Windows you use to qualify for the upgrade), it then asks you to swap back to the XP CD. It then then slams it all on you HD after asking a few simple questions like "What is the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow", well maybe not that hard...

Everything goes on in the background and is remarkably reboot free! Not only did it detect all my hardware in situ, it allowed me to activate the surround speakers on its firts boot into WinXP and even spotted my ADSL modem. I entered the ISP password during setup and avoided installing the Italian software that comes with it as an added bonus. The event itself took about 40 minutes from start to finish, installing the Home Edition on my PC.

First Run. When you boot XP tries to run a tour of itself & features, I say try, because I couldn't be bothered to watch & canceled it. As I already had a working net connection, security is an issue. Therefore I launched Internet Explorer and headed to the Tools menu. The first run of Windows Update found 12MB of critical updates & a further 12MB of recommended ones. Good job I have ADSL. 24MB later I should be a bit more secure/stable.

You are then faced with a Bluer, softer version of Windows with rounded corners and beveled edges which instantly feels like a comfortable setup. Several obvious changes strike you as you go about installing your favorite applications, WinXP supports Zippped files like they were directories. Wizards pop up all over the place & speech bubbles with info on all sorts of things. The bloody talking paperclip's friends appear all over the show, but you can disable them (with a cricket bat if I had my way). The majority of the changes are under the hood and transparent to the user. A quick trawl round the Control Panel shows the addition of Administrative Tools and Scanners & Cameras, the remainder are as before.

Media Player 8 doesn't guzzle all you resources like there is no tomorrow, unlike version 7. That said, Winamp 2.80 is my preferred option, making that kind of decision academic. Still, to give MS their due, it supports just about everything with the exception of Real Media, not that that is a huge loss, except if you like to watch the news from the BBC in video format. It also writes CDs as XP includes provided a limited version of Roxio's burn engine.

The help system has also had an overhaul. Users of WinME are familiar with the ridiculous loading time of "Help", the results it offered and the method used to display them also left much to be desired. I am pleased to report that XP's offering has been optimised and revamped. It's considerably quicker to load, logically laid out and makes sense to anyone. It also goes online for further help. Invite a friend to connect to your computer with Remote Assistance, Get support, or find information in Windows XP newsgroups. It can access the online Update facility, checks hardware compatibility, even offers to undo changes to you PC. 10 out of 10 for that lot.Did I mention it was Blue, like everything else?

The controversy over Microsoft's Product Activation may continue, but it amounted to little more than a click of the mouse button, hardly the worlds biggest inconvenience.

SOFTWARE ISSUES

Counter Strike. I though it would only be right and proper to fire up Counter Strike, which was blissfully unaware of the change of OS living on D: as it does with all my games. So I had to reinstall Gamespy3D and hunt down some servers. The game wanted to run in software mode :( and would NOT switch to OpenGL which offers a better image quality than D3D. The default XP drivers for my GF2 don't appear to support OpenGL correctly, so I installed Detonator 28.32 WHQL. That cured that problem, but my Logitech Mouse felt like it was knackered. The XP drivers have several mouse enhancing pieces of software that seem to do anything but enhance. So a copy of the just released Logitech 9.60 drivers was downloaded. This of course made no difference! Then I discovered the fault lies with Half Life (HL) not XP. You simply add these parameters to the command line that launches HL -noforcemparms -noforcemaccel Once I had sorted that out, it still took a fair bit of fine tuning to return the mouse to its usual perfect settings.

Bloody MS Instant Messenger. MSIM will not fark orft! Pops up all the time and bugs the hell out of me. I have used ICQ for literally years, it has be superseded by the compatible, but smaller & Ad Free Trillian, so I have no use for the damn thing. Just before you follow this guide to exterminate the infection, go to Outlook Express Tools/Options/General Tab & uncheck Automatically log onto Windows Messenger (Last entry under General) then ... Kill me now!

Kazzaa Lite. Kazzaa Lite's search engine crashes Kazza if you try to examine a Users files. This didn't occur under WinME, but it closed safely, I carried on surfing & even launched Kazzaa again and continued surfing. This certainly makes a change from rebooting every time.

Start Menu. I am still a little uncomfortable with the new Start Menu. Clicking the start button opens a double-paned list of most recently used files on the left & the left over odds & sods from the old menu system on the right. You can configure these as you like.

If you click All Programmes at the bottom of the list it activates a menu which looks & performs like that on older versions of Windows. This gets very messy in a short space of time & needs tidying.

The simplest method of doing this in the past was to go to Windows/Favorites and drag & drop to you hearts content.

In-line with its NT heritage & multiple users support, each user has a set of menus that are separate from the machine as a whole, i.e. All users get the default settings, but a game installed by one user is invisible to another. Well, they would be but I soon altered that ;)Anyway, they now reside in Documents & settings in All Users, Default User and a directory names after the individual users. If you amend by dragging & dropping on the Start Menu itself you get lots of warnings about affecting all users blah, drone...

As you can see I have tidied it up as I personally dislike the ridiculous screen-height menus that occur about 5 minutes into setting up Windows. You can alter the number of items sat on the main part of the menu also, the default is 6 and as you can see I'm trying out 8. The screen shot is blurry as I have tried to keep the file size down.

Customisation. They offer (as always) a Plus! pack which has a few themes, skins & visualisations for Media Player and a couple of so-so games. The only high note in it is the Aquarium screensaver. Even then, it only comes with 3 fish & you purchase the rest from the publisher. You can get it separately from Sachs anyway. Just to rub salt into the wound, MS actually offer free theme, skins etc here at their Fun Downloads, so why pay? You really should download the Bliss (shown below) screen saver which is incredible, clouds rolling across the sky over the hill. As for the games offered in the Plus! pack, let's face it, there is no shortage of freeware and shareware on the Internet to download.

CONCLUSION

That was it, a complete weekend of surfing with few ill effects and non I couldn't rectify after a few minutes, I have to say I'm impressed. I'm sure there is more learning and some tweaking to be done. It is different to look at, though you can revert to the old style if you want to. I have had no real hardware issues, though all my hardware is fairly new due to upgraditous ;-) I understand some older devices (anyone still using ISA cards?) are not supported, but anything made in the last 3 or 4 years should be fine.

All my favorite software has installed and run correctly (even Counter Strike in the end) and that surely is the measure of the OS. My PC runs noticeably quicker, that could be aided by a clag-free Registry, but it definitely feels quicker. Surfing is improved so it's probably worth it for that alone! A couple of days with the new look and it already feels like home.

Should the worst happen there are many sites out there offering help. Trouble with hardware should be at your manufacturers site, the same hold true for software, that said XP worked fine with most things for me. Then of course you can pop over to one of the many XP newsgroups.

Finally, is it worth your money? Yes.