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Windows XP Starter Edition Review

Posted by timothy on from the shill-game dept.

Digitalommm writes "Paul Thurrott has a story on the latest developments on Windows XP Starter Edition. There are some very good points that the Linux community could adopt. An example is end-user training videos such as how to use a mouse." This is an optimistic, even glowing look at the Starter Edition, which even for Thurrot was not available for unsupervised use, only demonstrated by Microsoft for him. (For using-a-mouse videos, I would suggest also Roblimo's book Point and Click Linux .)

5 of 430 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good Job Timothy by elleomea · · Score: 2, Informative

    "For viewing videos, you recommend a book." The book includes a DVD with training videos on.

  2. Re:I'm sorry... by magefile · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why aren't touchscreens commonplace? Google for "gorilla arm syndrome" sometime.

  3. Re:Good Job Timothy by tomstdenis · · Score: 2, Informative

    Um there are times when you can't kill a process from taskmgr. Other times they totally pwned the cpu time and you can't even open the task manager.

    As for being exploited I wasn't talking personally. I was talking about the vast # of other users and the risk in general.

    Just because you haven't been exploited doesn't mean you're safe. I mean the CHM exploits will go right through firewall and anti-virus tools if you download what you think is a valid CHM file., etc...

    Tom

    --
    Someday, I'll have a real sig.
  4. Two things... by BRSQUIRRL · · Score: 2, Informative

    First of all, while Paul Thurrott has from time to time said some nice things about free/open source projects (Firefox, most recently), the guy practically works for Microsoft and everything that comes from him should be filtered accordingly.

    Second, this 'starter edition' of Windows reeks of artificial market segmentation, a la DVD region encoding. Users overseas that presumably can't/won't pay Microsoft prices for Windows turn to piracy, so they are offered a scaled-down (both in price and functionality) version of Windows in the hopes that they will choose to pay something instead of just pirating it. But consumers here in the US (including those for whom this starter edition would be totally acceptable, capability-wise) are deemed to be able to afford the full versions of Windows and are therefore not allowed to so much as REVIEW (including Thurrott, long-time MS puppet), let alone purchase this edition.

    Something stinks...

  5. Re:Max. 3 programs by pla · · Score: 2, Informative
    I have about 30 entries in the Processes tab. I think you must mean the Applications tab

    Ummm... I'll quote myself here:
    Open up Task Manager.
    Click on the "Applications" tab.
    Now click on the "Processes" tab.

    We appear not to disagree, but it would seem that you somehow skipped over reading the second step. :-)

    Though I suppose it might have read a bit better if I reversed the order in which I mentioned TaskMan's tabs, I only intended to demonstrate the difference between "processes" and "programs" from the point of view of Windows XP.