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!"

Comments

My eXPerience with it

[stienman]

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

No 'eXPerience' yet, thanks anyway

[Xenex]

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...

Geez I've had great experiences

[redhotchil]

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.

it's not that great

[MrDingDong]

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.

Been forced, but havn't had any problems.

[MindStalker]

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.

Doesn't work as advertised

[uslinux.net]

What made you decide to migrate? What problems have you run into, and what features have you found beneficial?

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.

XP breaks my Group Policies - no backwards compat

[Llama Keeper]

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.

XP stole my goldfish, and unplugged my TV.

[Hobart]

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.

An upgrading eXPerience gone terribly wrong....

[Lawmeister]

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.