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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 .)

3 of 430 comments (clear)

  1. Review, my arse by gowen · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Thurrot was not available for unsupervised use, only demonstrated by Microsoft for him
    Sorry, but in my book that doesn't qualify him to write a "review", or anything like it. The word that should be used is "glorified adverts". People who write reviews must be allowed to experience what they're reviewing, and form critical opinions from that.
    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
  2. This could be dangerous! by TildeMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes, admittedly some people need to learn the most basic of skills, such as how to use a mouse. But the people at this basic level should not then be expected to know how to keep their computer completely up-to-date and patched, or even why that's important! Given how many problems have come out of MSIE recently and how most new users primarily want to use this magical 'internet' thing, this is a huge risk.

    There's really nothing more reliable for support than having a friend who knows what he/she is doing anyway.

  3. Max. 3 programs by RikRat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "The product can run three programs at a time. For those families, this is exactly what they want. That's a great experience for them." Right... exactly what they want. They want to run Explorer.exe, Internet Explorer, Outlook, Wor-- wait, close an application first! "One of the big criticisms about XP Starter Edition is that it can run just three applications simultaneously, so I was curious to see what it would do if you attempted to launch more than three. In this case, the system displays a notification window telling you that you can only run three applications. The notification roughly reads as, "With Windows XP Starter Edition, you can run three programs at a time. To open a new program, please save your work, close one open application, and open the new application again." Nice work! And I guess the 800x600 max resolution is also "exactly what they want". Bah.