InfoWorld says WinXP much slower than Win2K

iforgotmyfirstlogon submitted an InfoWorld story that makes the shocking claim that XP is slower then 2k for business use. Pretty graphs, comparisons of SMP, and they even tested without the eye candy. My favorite comment is this one "it appears that for light-duty service on the newest hardware, Windows XP with Office XP is an acceptable choice -- if an 11 percent performance hit, or 53 minutes added to an 8-hour day, is acceptable." And thats the best case scenario.

Comments

not the only performance hit

[Lumpy]

You also have a huge amount of retraining because XP doesnt look or act anything like the NT4.0 or Win2K models.

You now need to re-train your users on how to use the Operating system...

Gotta love how they say how linux is too hard to switch users too but dont mention that Microsoft does the exact same thing every 2 years to their user interface.

Re:not the only performance hit

[Heywood Yabuzof]

Huh? You can make XP look (and "work") a lot like 2K if you want to. I'm not using XP every day but on the TechNet versions we got to test, that's the first thing I did to customize it. I wouldn't really call it a "huge amount of retraining".

Now going from 9x to NT/2K/XP, that takes some re-training :-)

Re:not the only performance hit

[tmark]

Gotta love how they say how linux is too hard to switch users too but dont mention that Microsoft does the exact same thing every 2 years to their user interface.

I gotta love how Linux zealots downplay the difficulty in switching users to Linux but then jump on top of Microsoft when they change their UI - as if that made the abhorrent UIs currently available on Linux somehow even approximately as useable as (the still crappy) Windows UI.

Re:not the only performance hit

[wass]

You can even set XP to use the old GUI with a single click.

Kind of off-topic, but therein lies the rub on simplicity. An OS is an easy OS when you know it. Settings are easy to change when you know where to go poking around to change them.

When you know which series of menus to go through to change the XP look n' feel (is it really only a single click? I haven't used XP, or any windows for nearly 2 years now), that's easy. So too is it easy for someone to modprobe the latest tulip driver NIC driver in linux. Of course, not knowing how to do these things makes it more difficult for the newcomer. (yeah yeah I know, here on /. we're all geeks and finding the right setting for plain-old win9x look is probably fairly obvious, but is that true for everybody?)

Sorry, i know it's off-topic, your post just piqued me in a certain way.

Re:not the only performance hit

[geomcbay]

For the record, I've been a computer programmer since the C64 days. But I really dislike this "people who don't know how to use *real* computers are sheep" attitude.

Computers are no different than anything else: Cars, VCRs, whatever. Yet hardcore tech guys tend to think people are stupid for not learning how to "use" computers, often snickering at those who have never used a CLI. The simple fact of the matter is many people don't WANT to learn the in-depth operation of a computer just like most don't want to learn the exact details of how a car, tv, vcr or whatever works. They just want an extremely simple, fairly standard UI. They have lives to lead that include many things other than computer use and aren't willing to spend 1000s of hours learning the ins and outs of computer use just to type letters and surf the web -- and they shouldn't have to.

Re:not the only performance hit

[issachar]

that's not even remotely (no pun intended) on the same scale.

a remote control is a very simple system, and doesn't even come close to the complexity of Windows, Linux or any other major OS. More to the point, the UI on a remote doesn't change that much. The play button always looks the same, the rewind is always to the left of the play button and the fast forward is always to the right. stuff like that.

We need to be developing systems for the consumer that are about as idiot-proof as a your toaster or CD-player.

I don't know how my car is built, and I don't care. And I don't think that information should be necessary to drive my car. Same deal with computers.

Re:not the only performance hit

[kaladorn]

For the record, I don't consider people like this very smart. If you have no desire to learn the details of how something works, you shouldn't be using it. I know a guy who had no desire to learn how his car works

I will observe that there is a difference between having the interest in something and having the time to investigate it. For example, there was a time when a car was a fairly rudimentary thing to do most operations on. This was well before a dozen sensors controlled combustion, before vehicle engine control modules with arcane diagnostic codes that require a mechanic or a nasty piece of hardware to get at. This was before the level of complexity of those systems grew to the level it currently is.

I also don't know... you may have tremendous amounts of spare time. Most people don't. I'd love to know why my Doctor prescribes a certain medication, but at some level, I have to take his word for it as anything more than a beer n' pretzels explanation will exceed my university chemistry knowledge level. Similarly, I ask my mechanic why he's doing something, but once he moves off into bafflegab, I'm left with two choices: trust that he's a professional or don't.

I think I could probably walk around almost anyone's house or the environment they work in and identify at least some things about which they know little or nothing other than how to operate the item in question in a simple way. We humans now live in a complex world and not only is it infeasible for you to know something about everything you come in contact with, it is inefficient. Specialization is efficient. Knowing a little bit about a lot of things has some utility, but that isn't having real knowledge of those things. A veneer isn't in-depth knowledge. And if you spend your life trying to investigate all of the existing objects that you come in contact with, you won't be doing much else.

Reduction of complexity to usable levels is how humans cope with an increasingly complex world. Reducing formerly complex tasks which had to be understood in detail to black box technologies that anyone can get at least average utility out of is how we move on to dealing with higher level concerns. I for one am glad that I don't have to worry about what IRQ or DMA channel or I/O space address my various PC cards occupy now. There was a time when I did. I wasted hours friggin' around with these things because it was a necessity. It no longer is, and I can worry about new (and more worthwhile) concerns.

And, strictly as an aside, the snide down-the-nose look that most Geeks tend to give the untermensch that compose most of our world and who use M$ products doesn't exactly enhance the reputation of our caste nor encourage people to seek our help our to try our chosen solutions. In fact, it drives them deeper into the hands of those who offer them no pain and who pander to how the world is, not how we all wish it were.

Re:not the only performance hit

[vsync64]

I've said this before and I'll say it again. I don't in any way expect people to know every detail of how every component in their system works. I do, however, expect them to understand the basics before wreaking havoc upon the lives of others in the community they invade. I also expect them not to run away in disgust when knowledge is presented to them on a silver platter.

I don't know how everything in a car works, but I understand the basics of axles and gears. I don't know every line of telephone switch code by heart, but I understand the basics of country codes, area codes, and prefixes. And so on. For a computer, the equivalent is understanding the basic differences between short-term and long-term storage, how file systems are organized ("This is a folder/directory. You can put files or other folders in it."), and the like. For networks, the basics are host addressing schemes (TLDs, user@host, etc), simple protocol knowledge (no, your mail is not sent over the Web, even though there may be a Web front end, and there is more to the Internet than the WWW), and what "client", "server", "upload", and "download" mean. I have no sympathy whatsoever for anyone who refuses to learn these basics, any more than I would expect sympathy from a police officer if I attempted to drive without first learning what the pretty colors on traffic lights meant.

The second and more important issue I mentioned is that people tend to shun the acquisition of knowledge, especially when computers are involved. No, I don't know everything about how a VCR works. But I had a VHS tape I needed to watch the other day get crumpled, and what did I do? I broke out the screwdriver. And now I know exactly how the VCR releases the locks on the tape spools, how the tape feeds through the cartridge, and all the other knowledge that will let me more quickly diagnose a problem with my VCR if it ever occurs again, and I watched my video on time.

I don't expect every computer user to open the case every time something goes wrong, but I expect it to make at least a token effort at proper use and maintainence of the system it uses on a daily basis. If I say "your file system keeps getting corrupted because you keep turning off your computer when it is writing to disk", I expect you to stop cutting power in that fashion. If I say "the reason it keeps having to write to disk so much is that you need more than 32MB of RAM to run 5 applications at the same time", I expect you to get more RAM or stop whining to me, and certainly not to say "but it has a gigabyte" when I have explained the difference between short-term and long-term memory 5 times in the past 3 minutes.

If someone wants to be lazy and ignorant, that's his problem. But he shouldn't expect his life to be a seamless ocean of perfect technological ecstacy, and he shouldn't expect me to gladly mop up after him for free. I reserve the right to charge high prices for the accumulated technical knowledge of a lifetime, when he could have learned what he needs to know in 5 minutes of his own time.

Tell me again...

[Shotgun]

how this is ANY different from every previous release of Windows?

Hell, even Linux distributions are starting to follow this trend.

Windows XP upgrade sounds like a poor idea

[MarkWatson]

Windows 2000 is the first version of Windows that I really ever liked (and I did a commercial Windows app using 1.0 beta).

That said, the upgrade to XP seems like a poor idea for people already using Windows 2000 (mostly because of licensing issues, IMHO).

As Linux for the desktop gets better, I hope that Windows 2000 will be the last version of Windows that I will ever purchase (OK, wishfull thinking).

Mark Watson

I'm suprised by this

[johnburton]

Ok, so I'm not exactly a microsoft fan but I got XP professional recently because as a professional software developer I need to at least be aware of how it works, and what it does...

But I'm suprised because I subjectivly find it works noticably faster than 2000 seemed to do. Programs seem to load quicker and ot just seems more responsive. Could be because I reformatted and defragmented my disk I suppose.

Have to agree with the comments about moveing things around. Not a problem for me, but it did take me ages to find a few things first time.

Hard to argue with statistics

[Pov]

It's hard to argue with statistics from an authoritative source, but I'm running XP right now and I have XPerienced no qualitative decrease in performance over my old Win2K install. I would say I fit into the power-user category since I usually multi-task through a couple of applications and run with about 8 windows of something or other open at a time. I can't benchmark with pretty graphs, but I don't think I'm losing 53 minutes a day or even five.

This is a benchmark of only Office XP

[gburgyan]

How often in the last couple years did you notice "Gee, this word processor can't keep up with my mad typing skillz." So what if an automated benchmark can't make a bazillion documents as fast.

In the end there are lies, damn lies and benchmarks.

As someone who's used XP, the time lost (microseconds per day) are more than made up for with the added reliability of the system and the much easier recovery process. (Personal experience -- I was evaluating the system for work and purposely installed some crappy drivers that I knew would blow up; the system recovered just fine)

I read this in the print version of InfoWorld a few days ago and got pissed off then too. If you're going to beat up on M$, do it better for crying out loud. This is just like the dumb VM debates for Linux.

Oh please!

[mr.nobody]

Gotta love how they say how linux is too hard to switch users too but dont mention that Microsoft does the exact same thing every 2 years to their user interface.

What a load.

XP is the first time since Windows 95 that Microsoft has made a major change in the look and feel of the GUI. As 95 begat 98 which begat ME (and NT 4 begat 2000) minor things have changed such as the placement of the Windows Explorer icon and a Control Panel group or two, but the same basic grey bar at the bottom of the screen with the start button has always remained.

Every 2 years? Complete FUD.

Re:Oh please!

[ethereal]

If your servers are being managed by admins who can't figure out where the new controls for the server are, and can't RTFM on their own, then I truly pity you. But not too much, because you're probably the bastards that were propagating Code Red and Nimda :)

Wow... ignorance is bliss huh guys?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot is so predictable. The second I, and many other people who enjoy knowledge over ignorance, read the Infoworld benchmarks... I knew that Slashdot would post these, and ONLY these, and ignore the many other benchmarks that show WinXP performs as good if not better than 2k.

For instance, here is what Paul from WinInformant has to say:

"InfoWorld stood alone this week when it declared that Windows XP significantly underperformed Windows 2000 and Windows 9x in its tests. Not only do the controversial InfoWorld results fly in the face of Microsoft's published results and actual real-world use, they refute every independent XP performance test performed to date. One gets the idea that ... nah ... InfoWorld was trying to make XP lose. Don't believe me? Consider this: The following organizations have tested XP, independently of Microsoft: CNET/ZDNET, eTesting Labs, eWeek, PC Magazine, and PC World. All these independent labs came to the same conclusion: XP meets or exceeds the performance of Win2K and Win9x. The InfoWorld results are also at odds with real-world XP use, which already includes hundreds of thousands of beta testers, tens of thousands of IT professionals and developers, and hundreds of thousands of enterprise customers. "Microsoft has not received any indications that users are experiencing reduced performance compared with Windows 2000," a company spokesperson said. "We have had extensive feedback that Windows XP is better performing than Windows 9x." Go figure. And yet, you just know that every anti-Microsoft site on the planet is going to run with the InfoWorld story and not any of the positive stories. Ain't life grand?"

Looks like he hit that nail right on the head, huh?

Re:Wow... ignorance is bliss huh guys?

[vsync64]

We in the linux community, instead of bitching, need to look at XP as the new target. Look how good OSX and XP are. If we want to remain a competitor, we need to make our desktops this good. No excuses.

I don't make excuses. When coworkers start singing the praises of XP, I fire up Nautilus on my Slackware-running laptop and watch their jaws drop. Up the zoom level and it shows more information below each icon? "Wow, XP doesn't do that." Hover the pointer over a music file and hear a preview? "Wow, XP doesn't do that." Offer opaque file selection that doesn't skip and hop around grotesquely? "Wow, XP doesn't do that." Use the first few lines of a text file as a thumbnail icon? "Wow, XP doesn't do that."

It used to be that Linux was better as an overall system in terms of stability and fine-grained control, but suffered æsthetically and feature-wise when compared to Macs or even Windows. This has changed, I hope forever. I can honestly say that my "desktop experience" is vastly better in Linux than in Windows. Mozilla, with its tabbed browsing (and the middle mouse button, hooray); a decent window manager; and a file manager that doesn't offend me in every possible manner. And what am I intended to compare this with? IEXPLORE.EXE? rotfl.

(Nautilus, by the way, is the first GUI file manager, aside from the excellent TkDesk, to not disgust me within a minute, and the first to actually impress me on all fronts. I rarely load it, due to a desire to avoid RAM wastage, but it's quite nice, especially for browsing my photo collection. I might try ROX-Filer in the near future, just for variety.)

Numerical FUD

[spellcheckur]

I have to question the validity of any simulation that thinks that 100% of the average user's 8 hour work day is spent doing things that a computer isn't orders of magnitude too fast for.

I write code for a living, and while I've got a well tuned linux box to do all my compiling, any (speed) advantages it has over an $800 low-end Windows box when I'm writing emails or posting to /. is lost when I pause at the end of a sentence to consider my next thought.

(voiceover indicating speed being wasted goes here)

Your "average" user, in all likelihood, isn't running 100% processor intensive tasks. They're composing emails, or preparing presentations, or IMing their coworkers about the wording of some useless document. An 11% slowdown is going to cost them seconds on a day, not minutes. Certainly not 53 minutes.

Now don't get me wrong, I hate Windows with a passion, but isn't this the same kind of FUD we've been laughing at for years, just going in the other direction?

(Besides, who works an 8 hour day?)

Re:Same anecdotal evidence here

[JDAustin]

What stability increases have they made over Win2k? From what I have read, slim to none. If your running Win9x/ME, then XP is worth the upgrade (providing your hardware can handle it). But if your on 2k already, you probably wont see any change in stability, just in performance.

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[Christopher Thomas]

When it comes to commercial apps though like Windoze, rather than make something extraordinarily efficient that runs on the newest machines, they say "well the hardware takes care of efficiency, let's just make something with a lot of bells and whistles." What you end up with is grossly large applications that sloth along on extremely powerful machines that have the capability to be so much more. This is yet another reason to use Linux.

And of course, here on Linux, we never make the same mistake. We're all just chugging along with fvwm as our window manager and pico as our editor and all of our apps have a footprint of less than 4 megs in total...

And I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Bloat and feature creep happen on all platforms. It's just easier to escape under Linux, because you aren't locked into a single toolset. Calling it a Windows-only problem is a gross misnomer, however.

The real problem with sluggishness under Windows is actually device probing (during boot) and hard drive seek time (when launching anything, due to the many configuration files it checks). Swapping isn't a concern if you use your system wisely, and applications are usually quite responsive (YMMV). Branding Windows application programmers as lazy when your system bogs down is grossly oversimplifying.

Re:even more shocking...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to regret this, but ..

*sigh*

In this time of war, it boggles the mind that we let ourselves become divided over issues as trivial as spelling and grammar errors. We should be united as one, not divided up by a group of self-proclaimed Kings of Spelling. I can't speak for everybody, but as a highly-paid professional I can tell you that there are better ways that my time can be used than for proofreading. I would imagine that for the vast majority of Slashdot readers, going back and editing their content for spelling and grammar correctness is not fiscally worthwhile. You can end up spending almost double the time that you spent writing the thing in the first place. The time you spend doing that is time that you could be writing code or putting together a design or something actually worthwhile. You know, something that increases your productivity, helps the economy, and in general helps the world. You would have people spend all day playing the role of grammar-school teacher, sending the world's markets into a tailspin all the while.

I don't know what you grammar geeks have against prosperity and freedom, but I do know this: if I have to make a choice between world stability and picture-perfect Slashdot posts, I choose the former. For crying out loud, it was perfectly obvious what the guy meant. By igniting this silly little "flame war", you are declaring your own little jihad on the world economy. Well, bully for you. Personally, I support people who make grammatical mistakes on Slashdot, because at least they're doing something besides sacrificing lambs at the golden altar of anal retentiveness.

Configuration?

[yamla]

This document is meaningless without knowing more about their test setup. They list the CPUs of each computer but do not mention how much RAM each has. Consider the possibility that each machine has 64 megs of RAM. Unlikely, yes, but it would explain these results. Or perhaps the hard drives are set up with DMA enabled in Win2k and not enabled in WinXP.

Besides, as has been mentioned already, a system that performs 11% slower than another only means 53 minutes out of an 8 hour day if your CPU is 100% busy all the time.

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[captaineo]

"well now that we have all this power, why don't we use it all" and so they end up writing applications and OS's that hog all the newly available extra resources

Your statement is 100% correct but I strongly disagree with its implication... By wasting CPU cycles and disk space, programmers are achieving a higher level of complexity much more quickly and easily than before. e.g. by developing software in garbage-collected or dynamic languages like Java or Python, which dramatically reduce the difficulty of software development, at a moderate cost in efficiency.

Also consider e.g. a program that stores its data in flat or XML text files, versus packed binary files. The binary files are obviously going to waste less space, but you'll sure have a hard time editing them by hand.

So for most people it will be faster.

[Anton Anatopopov]

Since most people will only get XP on a new machine, for the vast majority of people, their experience will be of a faster OS. Albeit not as fast as 98 or ME could have been on the same hardware, but nonetheless faster, and with better functionality.

Everybody wins. If many people were running Linux, there would be less need to keep pushing the Moore's law envelope. In that respect we should thank "Osama" Bill Gates :-) for writing bloated buggy code that requires a 2GHz processor, otherwise such machines would not have been developed, since Linux runs fine on a 400MHz PII

Typical /. anti-MS FUD

[Diamon]

In the usual rush to post anything anti-MS, it appears to have been missed that the article states that WinXP & OfficeXP is slower than Win2K & Office2k.

The tests seem non-scientific at best. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to bash MS, this isn't one.

And on the topic of the gui changes there are some really good general usability improvements (top right pixel of screen is now part of the closed button on a maximimzed window, bottom left pixel now is part of the start button target), task based interface etc.

But if you want to compare speed do it apples to apples Office2k on Win2k and WinXP.

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[nolife]

You seem to be making a correlation between cost effective technology and advances in technology.

The costs of technology products are determined by market demand and competition.

Look at the advancement path that almost every computer peripheral has taken over the years.

Remember when a 28.8k modem was more then 2x the price of a 14.4? Do you really think that 28.8k modem cost that much more to make? Same with CD drives, first the 2x then a 4x and now a 72x. Do you think it took some technology breakthrough to get a 20x over a 10x? No. It is all marketing. Milk the consumer for every dime you can get. Once the market gets saturated the price comes down to a stable level and the "older" items drop off the bottom to maintain the bare minimum price. Watch the CPU market. Same process.
There is proof in this concept with a few CDR's that are the same exact model internally but have different firmware. So you pay less for the 8x version then the SAME EXACT 12x writer.
Look at the laser printer options. The market bottom appears to be about $1000 for a good printer. Why does HP not sell the HP4 for like $300? Because they have the 4000 and 4050 for the same price the LJ4 was 6 years ago. Does it really cost $1200 to produce a printer? Where is the technology advancement in that thing? Would most people be happy with a LJ4? YES

Who cares? This is totally academic...

[wrinkledshirt]

Let's face it. With the ridiculous performance and capacity gains that hardware makes, whether or not software is bloated or slow is not really an issue anymore. If it is, wait six months, and the hardware will be there that'll MAKE it a non-issue for the same cost as today's.

The software they make isn't really all that crappy anymore, either. Witness Carmack saying that the latest incarnations of DirectX are actually quite good. Witness the folks at Ximian breathlessly chasing Microsoft's .NET specs. Witness the fact that they own the office and home desktop. And witness the fact that some of their subdivisions make some great stuff (Age of Empires, anyone?).

If we're going to criticize Microsoft, let's keep it above the belt. Go after their shady business practices or go after their pricey licences or go after the handcuffs of dealing with proprietary formats, protocols and libraries. These are really the only three things that you can still legitimately criticize Microsoft on these days, and they're worthy enough topics to explore.

But covering our mouths and giggling because some guy got 11% less performance with one over the other? Come on...

Who Knows?

[EvilJohn]

C|Net disagrees.

Intrestingly enough WinInfo predicted this sort of response. Look under the title "InfoWorld Disses Windows XP: Who Do You Trust?" to see how the other half lives.

I wish these "OS reviews" were as in-depth as the gaming site's card and driver reviews. Both the C|Net and Infoworld reviews leave me with more questions they answer.

ridiculous extrapolation

[macpeep]

I'm not going to argue over the 11%. It may or may not be true but let's assume it IS true for a minute.

A user spends most of his/her time writing emails and documents, surfing the net etc. where the computer more or less idles all of the time. Even if a certain operation is 11% slower, you can't extrapolate it over the course of the day and come up with a figure of 53 minutes. I'm sorry but that's just idiotic. Most users will lose a few seconds per day over this! If there's even a small increase in productivity due to other things like, let's say clearer and simplified dialogs, faster access to your documents due to thumbnails in the file manager or something similar, it MORE than makes up for the lost couple of seconds.

Articles like this are really pathetic. You know, you don't HAVE to post something negative about Microsoft EVERY day.

Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was true -- but regardless, I hate Microsoft for this simple reason: They're more interested in making money than imporivng their software. Quantity of profit will always override quality of product. They are more interested in pushing their product than in caring whether it's actually better.

Malda Flamebaiting?

[Null_Packet]

I honestly have to wonder how many more of these stories Rob is going to continue submitting on this same line of articles. We have seen over the last year or so a steady increase in these kinds of articles by standard Slashdot Editors, and I have read a strong increase in support for Microsoft on Slashdot, strangely enough. I don't mean to imply that all or even most of Slashdot's readership is MS-biased, but I think Malda is letting his own bias show. Most Engineers who get frustrated with a particluar release of any software package vent by the water cooler, but I think Malda is venting via the articles he chooses, which shows a poor display of bias.

XP Launch

MS FrontPage

MS Loses Delay Appeal

Whether or not this post is modded up, I hope CmdrTaco takes notice that while he has founded and continues to heavily influence one of the best Tech-News Sites ever made, he needs to keep some kind of restraint. I'm not defending MS, but rather trying to promote the idea that you don't sit around all day and bash something you don't even use. I could understand if Malda was teased all day for running Linux in a Windows Shop, but I would guess that it's typically the other way around. When was the last time you even saw XP in person, Taco? or 2000? I don't post criticisms about the drivability of Ferarris and Saabs, or even Peugots- why? Because I have contact with them, and I don't consider myself to be anywhere near an authority on them. Maybe this kind of consideration should be taken to newer windows products with some of the Slashdot editors.

Re:IBM confirms this with recent study

[spongman]

jesus, named pipes are for networking not for IPC. shows how much IBM know about win32 programming. CreateNamedPipe() creates a pipe that is accessible across a network, whereas the results of UNIX's pipe() command are only accessible within that process (until it's forked). there are much better ways of doing IPC on windows than using named pipes.

(Dis)Info(rmation)World

[JesterzWild]

Seems to me that InfoWorld is either the only credible news source left in the tech world or there is something inherently wrong in their tests... just seeing how every other test (independent or not) of XP has shown that it is generally faster than 2000 and ME. Yes it lags behind somewhat on some tests, it speeds ahead on others, but for the most part it performs on par or slightly better than its counterparts. I also heard no complaints from beta testers and, now, owners of XP about the OS's speed. In fact I'm running the bare minimum configuration many have suggested for XP, a PII 350MHz with 128MB SDRAM, and XP runs circles around 2000 (well at least when I'm playing a little UT).

I noticed near the beggining of the posts that some thought that the XP interface was so different from the previous versions (and the same for all versions compared to the previous version) that users would have to be retrained on the OS. This seems to contradict with the same group of people attacking XP and Windows in general for NOT chaning the UI enough or adding more "true" functionality to it. Can't have it both ways folks... and those that I know who have used it, actually find it alot more intuitive than any version before it... well save some of my old OS2 stalwarts.