Are You XPerienced? A Quick Glance at Windows XP

Are You XPerienced? A Quick Glance at Windows XP
By John Wagner

Okay, Microsoft XP, the follow-on to Windows 2000, is here. The bad news is, there isn't much visible difference. And the good news is, there isn't much visible difference.

Windows 2000, nee Windows NT Version 5, was a major overhaul for Microsoft's flag-ship operating system, and this time around, the upgrade seems at first glance more cosmetic than cosmic for the average user. This should be good news to those weary of Windows 2000 upgrade trauma, but may leave others wondering "why bother?" We're going to take a slightly closer look at Windows XP, and let you decide for yourself.

More Than Just a Pretty Face

If there's so little that's new in XP, why would Microsoft bother with it in the first place? Well, it's not that there isn't anything new under that spruced-up but familiar interface, it's just that what's new isn't immediately visible to the casual end-user. There are plenty of good things there that don't meet the superficial eye.

To begin with, XP is, in fact, the first building block in what Microsoft calls their ".NET initiative" (and yes, it's pronounced "dot-net"). Basically, this is a model in which XML web services are used for Internet-based data exchange, independently of either the operating system or the language in which applications are written. The way in which the end-user employs all of this interconnectivity is what Microsoft calls the "experience" (XP = "eXPerience," see? Get it? Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.), and applications that take advantage of .NET are likewise ".NET experiences."

Being able to actually take advantage of these expanded capabilities is going to hinge largely upon .NET servers which can serve up Experiences to .NET-capable clients. At this writing, (Late January 2002), .NET Server (it's not called "XP Server") is not yet a commercially-released product, so it's difficult to get into any solid specifics about just how any of this will be done. But Microsoft is working hard to get .NET server released on schedule, along with a number of specialized application services. Just as we already have the Exchange Server and SQL Server, there will soon be the Application Center, the "BizTalk" Server, the Commerce Server, and others, all with their own compartmentalized commercial services to add to the ".NET Experience."

So for the time being, we're going to focus on Windows XP Professional, which is essentially Windows 2000 Professional, Version 5.1.

How Much Hardware?

Just about the first thing that anyone does these days when confronted by an OS upgrade is to cock a suspicious eyebrow and ask "how much memory and CPU does it need?" Not an unreasonable question, since software vendors are notorious for writing software geared toward leading edge (read: "new and expensive") hardware. However, I've upgraded several Windows 2000 machines to XP, including a 233MHz Pentium 1 with 146M of RAM, and I can report that there's not a noticeable performance difference. Of course it goes without saying that more memory is always better, a faster processor will always make CPU-intensive applications quicker, and fast disks will read data and load applications more rapidly. But my own experience has been that if a machine will run Windows 2000 Workstation acceptably well, it should be able to handle XP Professional with roughly equal performance.

Like Windows 2000, XP Pro is plug-and-play, but that doesn't necessarily mean that every single piece of hardware is supported by XP. As always, before attempting an up-grade, check the vendor's website for updated XP drivers. If there aren't any for your particular hardware, find out if the Windows 2000 drivers will still work under XP. Don't wait until after the upgrade to find out that you've got an unsupported video card, or sound card, or whatever.

This is particularly true for laptops, which tend strongly toward very specialized hardware devices. I upgraded my IBM A22m ThinkPad laptop from W2k to XP with no serious problems, but I needed to apply a BIOS upgrade and half a dozen different driver updates before everything was working the way it did before the upgrade and the ThinkPad utility key still doesn't work. On the other hand, my old IBM 380Z ThinkPad laptop with 96M RAM accepted the upgrade happily, with no problems whatever. This is Progress, I guess.

Media or Medea?

Windows Media Player Version 7 has been around longer than XP, of course. A Windows 2000 version was made available for free download so users could get used to the new look for the old Media Player. Judging from what I read on a lot of newsgroups at that time, beauty was not in the eye of the beholder. There were many complaints that if all the user wanted to do was play audio CDs or listen to streaming webcasts, Media Player 7 was bloated overkill. None of these gripes seem to have had any effect, since and expanded Media Player 8 has been implanted in Windows XP, with even more features.

To be fair, the Media Player now does a lot more than just play .WAV files and audio CDs. It allows the user to watch DVD movies (assuming that your computer has a DVD drive and either a fast enough CPU to do software MPEG decompression or a hardware MPEG decoder), to play a wide variety of audio and video file types, and to rip audio CDs. (For the uninitiated, to "rip" a CD is to copy its audio tracks to your local hard drive in some supported audio format). Media files on disk can be organized into "media libraries," for convenient classification. If you've got a CD burner attached to your computer, you can even create your own music CDs, using downloaded audio files and/or tracks ripped from CDs.

Personally, I prefer third-party DVD software such as MediaMatics or PowerDVD for watching movies on my laptop, but the Media Player does a decent job, and, since it comes with the operating system, you can't beat the price.

If you'd like to try your hand at video editing, there's also the new Windows Movie Maker, a cheap-and-cheerful video editing package in the Accessories menu.

Okay, Adobe Premiere it's not. But you don't have to pay extra for it, either.

Getting Burned

And speaking of CD burning, XP now has CD-writing software built in, and not just for making music CDs. Writing data files to a CD is now a click-and-drag operation within the Windows Explorer. Saves you the cost of software like EZ-CD, and it works well with my HP SCSI CD-Writer drive. Check with your hardware vendor to be sure your writable CD drive is supported.

Like the Media Player, the CD-writing ability of XP is relatively basic, without a lot of the frills you'll get with specialized software. The technology has been licensed from Roxio, Inc., which will happily sell you a full-blown version with all of their value-added features, if you need them.

Wish You Were Here: The Remote Desktop

Some administrators of Windows 2000 domains already know about the Windows Terminal Server. Essentially, this is client-server software that allows a user on a client machine to open a window which is a complete Windows desktop on a remote server machine.

Under Windows 2000, the client software did not ship with W2k Professional. A utility was provided on the Server CD that allowed administrators to create floppy disks from which the client software could be installed.

XP, however, has this functionality built in. The Remote Desktop allows an XP user to open a desktop on any remote machine which is running the Remote Desktop Server services. This can be a .NET application server or another XP workstation.

What? You can open a desktop to another XP workstation? Does that mean that anyone can see what I'm doing?

No! You have to specifically enable other users to connect via Remote Desktop (Control Panel/System/Remote). Feel better now?

So why would I want to open a Remote Desktop to another workstation in the first place?

Well, when I'm sitting at the laptop that I keep on my office desk, I have several remote desktops open at once. One to the machine where I have my Visual Studio compilers and CD burner installed, and usually several more to various servers where I'm doing administrative tasks. And, consider this, have you ever been at home, and wished you could log on to your office machine? With Remote Desktop, you can. And you can even map the local machine's disk drives (yes, including the floppy and CD drives) to the remote machine, so that you can share files across both of them. You can also choose to map local printers across the remote connection, whether to receive sounds generated by the remote machine on your local machine, whether or not to display the remote machine's desktop wallpaper... there are a lot of options to customize the Remote Desktop environment, adding features if you're on a fast network, or removing them for connecting via a modem. Yes, it works quite well across a modem. Remote Desktop uses Microsoft's own RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) that allows the user to tailor the number of resources redirected between host and client.

And of course, the Remote Desktop's expanded features work just as well when connecting to a .NET application server.

Obviously, not everyone has a need for Remote Desktop. But those who do will find it very handy.

Directly related to Remote Desktop is a feature called "Remote Assistance." When enabled, this allows a remote user to take control of your local machine for problem-solving or diagnostics. And no, it isn't enabled automatically, you have to turn it on. Unlike Remote Desktop, Remote Assistance is a "please help!" feature.

Another spin-off of Remote Desktop is Fast User Switching. Third-party multiple desktops have been old news for many years, but User Switching takes the concept one step higher. With User Switching, multiple users can switch between their personal logon sessions without having to log on or off the machine. It requires some healthy system memory to make this work well, especially if you and the other users are hacking away with memory-intensive applications, and I've got to admit that it seems to be a slick solution to a fairly non-critical problem. But when you're in the middle of editing a complex Photoshop image and your spouse wants to log on and check her e-mail, there's no denying that User Switching can have its uses.

New Make-up

A Microsoft upgrade wouldn't be complete without the usual snazzy improvements to the user interface, would it? And so XP's window display has received a minor facelift (which you can turn off if you really prefer the older style):

Rounded-off window edges, glossy buttons (it reminds me of a 1951 plastic table radio), flashier icons. A lot of small things work in somewhat more intuitive ways. Many of the utility programs are more functional. The Start menu is redesigned and more customizable:

Oh yeah, and, for those who think that FreeCell is an Olympic sport, there are now no less than eleven built-in games.

It's all an attractive freshening-up, not earth-shaking but not requiring any major user re-training either.

Odds and Ends

Other assorted improvements and enhancements of varying degrees of significance are:

Improved power management for laptops.
Driver Rollback, which allows you to "roll back" to the previous version of a hardware driver if the current driver upgrade didn't work.
System Restore, which allows you to bring the system back to a previous state in case you stupidly made a mess of... er, in case that lousy software package you just installed screwed up your system.
Windows Update, a simplified method of applying hotfixes and service packs directly from the Microsoft website, with a couple of mouse clicks. You can automate this process, if you wish, by selecting the AutoUpdate option. This is a little too Big Brotherish for me, but some folks will like it. Obviously, it depends upon being network-connected.
Improved network security.
Support for 64-bit processors. Okay, at this point, most of us don't have 64-bit processors on our desks. But someday we will, and XP is already prepared, with a Windows XP 64-Bit Edition.
Taskbar File Grouping. Ever have six instances of Notepad open at once, and been annoyed by having half a dozen Notepad icons eating up space on your taskbar? Multiple Windows Explorers? Multiple Word documents? By the time you're done opening all those applications, the Taskbar can look like a line of ants, with icons so tiny and cryptically-labeled that it becomes sheer guesswork to find the one you want. XP simplifies this by grouping multiple instances of the same application into a single taskbar icon. The icon "opens up" to show the individual tasks when clicked:

Expanded device support, especially for multimedia devices. It doesn't take a crystal ball to see that Microsoft envisions a big future for digital multimedia under XP and its successors.
Application Compatibility Mode. Ever been seriously annoyed by software written for Windows 95 or 98 that won't install under NT4 or W2k because the programmers tried to prevent its installation under DOS by using hardcoded traps to look for 95 or 98? Or by software that tries to make use of Windows 95- or 98-specific features? Well, you've finally gotten your revenge. XP has a Compatibility Mode feature that lets you "fool" a given piece of software into thinking that itąs running on a Windows 95, Windows 98, NT4, Windows ME, or Windows 2000 system.
Further enhancements to Plug and Play functionality.

All useful things and nice to know, but is that all there is to XP? No! Nor is there room in a superficial introduction such as this to get into nitty-gritty details of all that's under XP's hood. These are only the high points that the new user will be likely to notice first. Those contemplating the transition to XP are advised to check the URLs listed in the "Further Reading" section below. Or just type "Windows XP" into your favorite search engine and see what you come up with.

To XP Or Not To XP?

Good question. Windows XP is more like the first step into Microsoft's new direction than a quantum jump up from the past (as Windows 2000 was from NT4). So if you're already running Windows 2000, should you make the upgrade?

For the moment, that's not as clear-cut a question as it might be. Certainly there's no really compelling functional reason for the average end-user who's not planning any major hardware changes to do so at this time. If I had to pay full retail price for Windows XP, I might well think long and hard about it.

On the other hand, the University's excellent site-licensing arrangements with Microsoft make the XP upgrade available to students and staff at a very attractive cost. There will be no further upgrades to Windows 2000, so to get any of the goodies that come with XP, XP itself is the price of admission. And, given the fact that software vendors inevitably start writing for the latest versions of an OS, and that you're probably going to want to upgrade eventually anyway, maybe this is the time to start giving XP some serious thought. Of course, there are always those folks who want to wait for the first service pack before upgrading, and itąd be hard to argue with them!

When you do decide to upgrade from Windows 2000, be sure and follow the standard cautionary steps: Make sure all your hardware is compatible and has XP drivers, make sure your software will work with XP, etc. And above all, don't neglect to do a complete backup before you start! Make sure that your "XPerience" is one you'll be glad you took.