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Windows XP - The eXPerience Thus Far?
An Anonymous Coward asks: "So Windows XP has been out long enough
for those of us in the IT field to have our managers, users, and
vendors hitting us up for it (Redmond's marketing apparently worked).
So, how has Windows XP affected your IT department and company thus
far? Are you using it, or planning on using it? What made you decide
to migrate? What problems have you run into, and what features have
you found beneficial? Please leave out the anti-MS/pro-Linux rhetoric
unless it is directly related to an issue you have with XP.
Thanks!"
My current client has almost zero deployment of Windows XP. The only people I know who have it are all the MCSE's.
The corporate PCs stay at one operating system from the moment the leased PC is placed on the users' desk until the PC goes off lease. Upgrades to existing PCs are rare and hard to acquire, with extra memory being about the only thing you can get. And even then, they __lease__ the RAM modules (dumb dumb dumb).
There is still a large deployment of Windows 95, and of Windows NT. Maybe 10% of the corporate desktops are Windows 2000 -- but I think the number is closer to 5%. (roughly 75,000 user population) The software deployment I'm involved in drew protest howls from locations that have Windows 95 on Pentium 100's with 32MB of RAM.
Can't put XP on those babies.
I work for a company involved with the deployment and support of Windows 2000 (and to a lesser extent now, NT 4.0) systems.
We've sworn off Windows XP for at least 12 months.
No matter what the Microsoft marketing says about XP Professional being the client of choice for Windows 2000 Server, there is no reason to move away from the (relatively) proven Windows 2000 Professional. The supposed 'benefits' (updated GUI that the majority turn off, a few apps, and a whole bunch of Passport crap) are not justified by the issues introduced with the 'upgrade'.
The little we have actually dealt with it in a work environment (smaller clients that have set up their own computers) have been nothing but trouble. Callouts because they can't activate it themselves. Yes, it's a three-click operation, but some of these people are scared of the computers enough, let alone when the operating system they have paid for decides not to work anymore. Software (both obscure and not) that has decided not to work, even between 2000 and XP. It's hard to explain "Well, your new computer that you've bought can't do that. At all."
So, supporting small clients is harder, and no-one in their right mind rolls out a two month old unproven OS for large clients. We are using Windows 2000 now, and will be for the next 12 months.
Perhaps we'll look at XP Professional again in 2003...
I was using Redhat 7.2 as my desktop until Windows XP came out. Gave it a try and now I am fully switched over. I still run slackware on my servers, but I think that for all Microsoft has done wrong, they finally got something right.
IMHO it definitely leaves things to be desired. It's designed for the computer illiterate, evident in its improved (though not spectacular) user interface. I use it primary on my laptop, and run Linux on my PC as a networking gateway (and to watch TV).
.NET Passport? Yeah, it's integrated into Windows XP. Some of my friends are on MSN Messenger, so to chat with them, I have to integrate Passport into my Windows XP "experience". Of course, I already had one when Microsoft "upgraded" my Hotmail account to a Passport account.
I see plenty of features with which Microsoft has gone overkill. For example, they store a backup of all your system DLLs in \windows\system32\dllcache (assuming you have the default installation path set). This includes files for Internet Explorer, Movie Maker and Messenger. It also installs MSN Explorer by default, and you must manually remove it from your system through the control panel.
One of the biggest difficulties with migrating down to Windows XP is using old applications. Most work, though I do a lot of Windows CE development, and their development tools don't work. ActiveSync seems to go crazy, and won't establish a connection with the eMbedded Tools IDE. So much for backwards compatibility. Device connectability has always been a problem (with ActiveSync and the embedded development tools) but it's even worse on XP.
The memory footprint is huge - don't bother running it on any less than 128MB of RAM.
The Remote Assistance tool is reminiscent of *nix X Server/Client interface. I also find XP more stable than Windows 2000. You shouldn't be misled by the migration from Windows ME to Windows XP. They're designed under entirely different code bases. I think that may be the reason why Microsoft chose to rename NT5 to Windows 2000, to eliminate the first-glance impression that 9x and NT are two entirely different operating systems - which they are, but not for the benefit of marketing.
So much for open competition. If you have MSN Messenger on your system (ie: you haven't found a way to delete it), Outlook and Internet Explorer will launch it automatically. You must exit these two apps before you can close MSN Messenger. Alternatively, you can read-protect the file through the NTFS security features to prevent even the system from accessing it.
Microsoft also wants to dictate where you should store your files. If you save a web picture to a directory outside of your "My Documents\My Pictures" folder, this will be the default path until you re-open Internet Explorer. Then you have to navigate out of "My Documents\My Pictures" yet again. So much for the intelligent operating system.
I think the keenest feature is the font smoothing - You can enable ClearType font smoothing from the desktop settings panel, and fonts will look oh-so-crisp on laptop displays - even regular CRTs.
And
SO... if you've been stuck with Windows ME, it's time for an upgrade. For all intents and purposes, XP still seems like the next step forward in the NT-branch of Windows OS's. If you're happy with Windows 2000, stick with that. Don't give up your limited freedom of choice by installing XP and having it force Internet Explorer, Messenger and Movie Maker on you. If you're thinking of going to Windows XP for its user interface configurability, don't bother. It comes with only the new "XP" theme, and the old Windows 2000 theme. You have to buy Plus! to get any more, and even then, there are only 4 cheesy themes that come with it.
Bottom line - if it works, don't fix it.
Don't by an X-Box either [/me runs for cover].
I've migrated from NT 4.0 -> Win2k -> XP over the past 3 years and the XP install was by far the easiest, most trouble free and most painless.
/etc/bin/usr/local/conf or any of that crap.
My very vanilla config:
Intel 866EB
512MB RAM
10GB storage on 2 older UDMA drives (I know I should upgrade since drives are so cheap, but if it ain't broken...)
52x CDROM
Voodoo3 3k
Viewsonic 17"
NetGear 10/100 NIC + DSL
HP 5L parallel port
When I installed XP it properly detected and installed ALL of my devices (including my printer and my NIC/DSL connection) the very first time. From the first time it booted after installing, everything worked. I remember having to struggle to get devices (printers, NICs and modems most notably) to work under NT4, and I was thrilled to bits not to have to go through that circle of hell again. XP just works.
When my wife got a laptop and wanted to use the printer from her machine via our home LAN, all I had to do was click "share printer" and magically she can print from her WinME laptop. XP just works. I didn't have to fiddle with any config files in
The last time I rebooted my XP machine was when the power went out about a month ago. I have had zero systems problems since installing XP.
I'm not saying that XP is better than Linux, or that every company should run out and upgrade, but I am saying that I have had a significantly lower cost of administration and higher reliability on my home development machine with windows XP than with any other OS I've ever used. And yes, I've used Mandrake 6.0 and RH 7.0 distros, and yes, they did finally work once I read many howtos and books. JWZ said it best: "Linux is free if your time has no value."
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
Our company's virus scanner doesn't work with XP. We use Trend Corporate Officescan which automatically updates all clients every day, and has a really nice web interface. However, they are just now BETA testing the XP version. I couldn't even get the machine to boot after installing the program. It froze on a black screen during the first restart. The only way to recover was to boot to Safe Mode, then uninstall the program, and I had to call tech support to help me fix some key registry entries. Overall, XP seems like a nice system, but I'd advise anyone that makes purchasing decisions for larger companies to hold off until all the apps are updated for it.
I am running XP on a PC at home and we run Win2K Pro at work. XP is a huge step up from Win 9x but not so much from Win2K. It seems to be Win2K + new features such as remote control + support for DOS and Win9x software such as games.
In a business setting I'd say a standardized OS environment is much more important than any new XP features. I'd hold off on XP until I was ready to move every desktop to that OS. Standardization is an accepted best practice in IT administration.
The following post is from an email I received from one of our contractors, all identifying references have been removed to protect the guilty.. ;-)
----
Initially we installed XP on workstations within an NT 4.0 domain and had no
problems other than mapping network printers was not straight forward. If
we used the Add Printer Wizard on the XP workstation, we could not see any
network printers. If we dragged and dropped a network printer from Windows
Explorer to the printers window, it would install - not a big deal we
thought, which is why we decided to move forward. However, when we tried to
convert our Windows 2000 network workstations, we started encountering
issues with the network trusts between the workstations and servers. One
minute the trust was there and the next it was gone and had to be manually
rebuilt. Also, we were constantly getting error messages that the
workstation time and the server time could not be synched so network logons
were denied, At one point the local admin could not logon locally because of
this time issue. Share permissions would drop randomly and had to be
re-established. User logon scripts would not run. Network printers would
not map correctly and in some cases, workstations could not even see a
network printer that was visible to other workstations. We tried connecting
via a Workgroup instead of a Domain and that almost worked but we would have
to manually create network share connections for each workstation and we
never could get a network printer to work this way. XP also would not allow
our Adaptec CD burning software to run - it outright disabled it after it
blue-screened twice on boot up and it's built in burning software just plain
did not work at all. There is no patch for Partition Magic 6.0 (which we
just upgraded to use with Windows 2000) so we had to purchase 7.0 ( we have
some dual boot machines). XP would not recognize our scanners, mind you
they are 3 years old. Another big thing that concerned me was, on a couple
of machines we turned on automatic update and noticed that just about every
day, Microsoft released patches.
So after spending 3 days converting to XP we spent another 3 days converting
back.
While I do not profess to be an O/S expert, I think I'm going to wait for a
while. In my opinion this is not a step forward from Windows 2000 yet
however it is a diagonal step from Windows 9X to a unified code base. My
daughters are using it on their home computers and it works well for them.
I still have it on my laptop and as long as it stays away from a network - I
kind of like it.
Sounds to me like M$ achieved another goal.
The destruction of a competitors software...
By taking Novell out and putting M$ in, they win.
Did you consider Samba?
So here I am sitting at one of my computers, reading slashdot, trying to fix a bug in some rebol code and listening to losslessly-compressed Destiny's Child, and I suddenly think to myself: "What fucking operating system am I running at the moment ?"
/. "target group", i.e. some sort of cross between a programmer and a "consumer computer-user" (music, video, web-browsing, email etc.) then you can do everything you want to do with any OS.
...
It turns out that it's RH 7.2, but the important point is that it could have been freebsd 4.4, win2k, winxp or some flav. of linux. I have all these systems on various computers at home and they all have a decent web-browser with AA fonts (konqueror or ie6), the gui programming whatsit REBOLView and a media player that supports FLAC (xmms or winamp).
The only thing that would require using a specific os (at least for me at the moment) would be games, for which I would need a flav. of Windows, but then I have WinXP installed on one certain computer anyway and the reason is that it's the fastest processor, best gfx card etc.
I find it interesting now that I think about it; It seems that if you fall into the
Lots of unix things are available for Win32: vi, emacs, the gimp, bash, plus you have all the things that are available for multiple platforms e.g. REBOL, java, clisp and lots of my other fave. programming languages, plus all the great programming libs: readline, gc, regexp etc.
Then you have the other things like the fact that KDE is constantly trying to become Windows in look and feel, ssh and telnet work in both Windows and unix and both VNC and X-clients work anywhere
Honestly, is it any wonder that I find it hard to tell which operating system I am in any more ?
The upshot of this is that for a large group of people the os is irrelevant and they can either pay for Windows or have a flav. of unix for free if they are willing to spend a little more time setting it up. (Don't bother flaming me for that- it's just my experience- your distribution may vary).
graspee
in redhat 7.2
(apparently)