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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!"
I've been on the beta program since April, and can say that the only real reason to upgrade over 98/me is stability. I wouldn't bother upgrading win2k computers. the extra features are nice, but most of them are either 1) new, and therefore not full-featured (or fully tested/trusted) compared to alternatives (compare PCAnywhere to the Remote feature) or 2) available for win98/me and 2k.
I'm not going back. Sure, it doesn't work with my older web cam, my opti931 sound cards and a few other *low cost* pieces of some computers I've put it on, and the software that came with my $250 cd burner (also purchased in April - CD Creator 4) is also unusable (the only real loss I have with it - I can only use the built in CD burning functions right now) but I've had about 4 stops (when the system halts, dumps memory to the HD and reboots because of some hardware or software issue) in this entire time, and I only reboot when I install software (which was something that was supposed to be fixed, but oh well)
Having said that, I should also say that I'm not going to upgrade the office I work for. Sure, the benefits would be great, but we can't afford the $99 per computer when win98 works for us. Even if we had crashes on each computer daily, we still wouldn't save enough time and money to make up for the cost of the upgrade to the home version, nevermind professional. So it's installed on one computer which has to be rock solid - it's the one I dial into when I'm away from work (I work at home 3 of 5 days a week) and also serves a simple PHP/APACHE site which shows some MS access database information, but isn't worth a full blown server.
So the only thing against it is the 'MS Tax' and the only thing you're getting for that money is the stability we all should have gotten 10 years ago from MS.
-Adam
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...
At my office the usual response from our 'Wintel' group is, "We'll deploy it once they release Service Pack 2."
I also found out that, althgough there are XP 'drivers' available for many wireless cards, because of the wireless integration in XP, they don't work so good. It seems that companies have just updated their drivers, but with all the built-in configuration abilities of XP, they'll need to write _new_ drivers, not just update old ones.
But I guess XP is the windows future. Now, if Microsoft would just release a Remote Desktop Client with 128-bit encryption for linux, I'll be all set! Yeah, and we'll all be living on Mars by then!
My experiences with XP are close to perfect. It has yet to bluescreen or take me down to restart because of error (even linux has done that in the past). IE is super fast and works everywhere. The interapplication communication and drag-and-drop are a great timesaver. The only complaint I have is there is no driver written for the Samsung Uproar 64 meg mp3 player/cellphone of mine. Oh well, I just use my laptop... Also, I have yet to find an app that doesn't work with XP that I need...
As far as I am still concerned, Windows still wins in the desktop war.
First of all, where I work, we are still discussing when/how to upgrade from NT to 2K. We'll probably upgrade to XP around 2005 I would guess.
I have installed it clean on a machine I have at home and I am not all that impressed with it. I use Yahoo Messenger a lot, and I have frequent hard system lock ups, where I have to power cycle the box. I also have a disk on the same box with 2K on it and I don't have the same problem, even though I use Yahoo Messenger about the same under both OSs. So my experience has been that XP is *less* stable than 2K.
I work for an office connected with a major university. I've hand built a few high end workstations recently, in which I was planning on installing 2000, but the university and its license agreements won't license 2000 anyways. So we purchased XP licensed, and figured we'd give them a try, and install 2000 without a license if they didn't work (cause in my book a 2000 installation with an XP license isn't stealing from nobody.) Anyways, so far the XPs have been running great. Turned off the neato graphics to speed them up, and they have been crunching databases doublegood.
Our experiences here have been that it is too slow for computers under 600 MHZ. Also the Novell Support, which has gotten worse at every release of windows, is now so bad XP clients can break Novell Servers by copying files to them. If you run Novell Servers it would be best to replace them with Windows servers before upgrading to XP.
I reverted my test boxes to win2k because
1) XP requires too much CPU and memory.
2) XP devices drivers don't work for my wireless cards.
3) I did not have patience to get Zone Alarm over the hurdles.
Win2k handles desktop very well for admins and
managers. The techs tend to run RedHat or Mandrake or Solaris.
Of course, none of our servers run any variety of Windows, nor ever will. I'd rather spend time on
bizdev than in court with ex-customers!
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
So far we've had three executives upgrade for the Microsoft Personal Flight(tm) feature. Unforunately, all three have plummeted to their death when leaping from the building. Microsoft claims that will be fixed in SP2. In the mean time, we're hiring to fill their positions.
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.
I'm one of the Macintosh guys here at the college I work for, and the Windows group seems to be taking the same tack with XP that I am with OS X -- don't deploy it anywhere essential just yet.
Both operating systems will probably be installed on the "Internet Stations" and other non-critical student systems in the next few months just to test the reaction. But a full migration won't even be discussed until at least summertime, which means implemented at the beginning of 2003.
There's a lot of institutional inertia, you know?
--saint
I consult for a group of medical facilities that has an uber-paranoid security model. We run an completely win2k office, I tried an XP client on my test network and 1/2 of my group policies failed to work. Friggin Internet Explorer always loads, I can't remove the icon from the desktop like in Win2K (these machines are not and never will be connected to he internet), and roaming profiles and dekstop redirection are broken. SO I will not be upgrading till about 2006 or so.
Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
I installed Windows XP Home Edition (upgrade)
It re-wrote my hard drive. Not only that, but it scrambled disks that were close to my computer. It recalibrated my refrigerator's coolness setting so all my ice cream went melty. It demagnetized the strips on all my credit cards, screwed up the tracking on my television and used subspace field harmonics to scratch any CD's I tried to play.
(Actually, it installed a bit nicer than Win2K, but is full of more stuff that needs turning off. I moved from 95 to NT4, so I never experienced the hell of 98/ME, but I sure don't miss it. It's no more tedious to turn off the candy stuff than the installation of any of today's media players. The Terminal Services [switch-user] stuff is pretty neat. And for $99 I grabbed Works Suite 2002 -- comes with Word XP that has neat speech-recognition stuff. The Philips Toucam Pro webcam drivers bundled still suck. The "restore point" thingy saved me a lot of hassle from a bad Intel video driver update. The ability to turn off the pagefile is neat. The new sound schemes are annoying. MSPAINT supporting GIF, JPEG, and PNG is nice.)
(ahem) Windows XP will give you Dutch Elm disease. It will leave the toilet seat up. It will make a batch of Methamphetamines in your bathtub and then leave bacon cooking on the stove while it goes out to chase gradeschoolers with your new snowblower.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
I put XP on my new ThinkPad T23 as soon as I got it. It's working wonderful. I use that system every day from home to work and it is NEVER rebooted. The system has not crashed a single time. When it's not plugged in I take it in and out of standby all the time and it works every time. I've had a lot of trouble with Win2K and standby on notebooks, but so far XP is rock solid.
I'm not deploying it at work until we do more application testing with it, but if the apps work I wouldn't hesitate at all.
It really is good stuff.
http://www.sis.com/support/driver/630lan.htm
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.
but for all those people who were running Windows 95, I couldn't see anything in Windows 98 worth the price of upgrading
Gee, maybe semi-decent USB support and better gaming....how about a better shell....how about better power management on my laptop...etc...etc..
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
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)
- 3.10 Windows NT: Win16 hacked onto OS/2 1.3. Some 32-bit support.
- 3.50 Windows NT: Support for Win95 style 32-bit code
- 3.51 Windows NT: Win95 style shell.
- 4.00 Windows NT: Rewrite of lower levels. Mostly supports NT 3.51 stuff. HPFS still works, but not supplied. Some utilities from this work under Win95 and 98.
- 5.00 Windows 2000: Win98 style shell, with IE integration. OS/2 subsystem still works, HPFS does not work. Bitmaps are the same as v4
- 5.01 Windows XP: New shell, better DOS support, but no OS/2 subsystem. This might work if copied from Win2k. Bitmaps are same as v4.
Version Nr according to JPSoftware.
Upgrade from 5.00 to 5.01 does not sound like a big upgrade.OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.