The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Do I Need Windows XP? George Skarbek gskarbek@melbpc.org.au

In my opinion Windows XP is a very solid operating system with some worthwhile improvements over Windows 9x. Any new computer purchased should definitely have Windows XP. However, if your current system is stable and not shared with other users, you probably do not need to upgrade.

There is always a lot of discussion about the merits of an operating system and I would suggest the operating system is not all that important to the average user. It is the application programs, such as word processing, financial record management, image manipulation, games, etc that are more important to most.

Before deciding to purchase the upgrade you must ask yourself what features this upgraded operating system will give you that you don't have now, what facilities you will lose, and then decide.

I think very few people will really need to upgrade their existing operating system, although clearly many will want to have it just because it is new and seems to offer new features. To answer the upgrade question you must ask yourself how much of your time is spent using application programs such a word processor, spreadsheet or game, and how much of your time is spent in using the operating system and the utility programs that come with it. Then ask yourself what new upgrades in Windows XP are essential, and endeavour to determine beforehand whether any of your existing programs will fail to run.

Unlike the huge change from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, this is a smaller, although still significant upgrade. There are a number of advantages in Windows XP over Windows 98 and some of the more important are listed below.

However, I am not convinced it's worth the $200 or more to upgrade from Windows 9x if you have a stable system.

Improvements

In my opinion the following points are the most important improvements:

• The main advantage is the improvement in stability over Windows 9x. Windows XP is based on the industrial-strength NT operating system, which became Windows 2000.
• Most applications, including Microsoft Office, will run faster than they do on Windows 9x.Switching between users who share the one computer is much easier. Each user can keep his/her own desktop settings.
• It supports an improved file system, NTFS. This has many advantages over the FAT system such as:
  • slightly better space utilisation for large disks
  • automatic compression for individual files or folders
  • offers good security and will prevent others from viewing the contents of your "My Documents" folder when they are using Windows Explorer or even trying to access that folder from DOS. See Figure 2.
  • Can implement disk quotas for individual users and prevent your children or other users from filling the hard disk by copying many CD-ROMs onto it. In this aspect nobody will be able to accuse Microsoft of not thinking ahead with the address space. In their earlier days they never imagined that anyone would ever need more than 640 KB (0.6 MB) of memory and the early operating systems were design limited. You can specify the disk quota in KB, MB, GB, TB, PB and EB. For those of you who are not familiar with the prefixes after Tera, one Petabyte is one million Gigabytes, an Etabyte is one thousand Petabytes and you can put in a 12 digit number for the number of Petabytes that you wish to constrain a user's space on your hard disk. My guess is that the current limit is more than all the combined hard disk capacity on the globe. See Figure 3.
• Extensive multimedia support. You can view images as thumbnails from Explorer, load images directly from a digital camera without needing other software. XP can automatically resize your photos for e-mailing. It also has native support for writing CDs. Updated media player with DVD support.
• Remote Assistance where another user can log into your computer and take it over in order to fix some problems.
• Built-in firewall to prevent a human hacker from accessing your computer. Note: this is not an anti-virus product.
• Some rollback capability and System Restore options. For example, if you have installed incorrect video drivers you can roll back to the prior versions, or if a virus has infected some critical Windows files that cannot be cleaned, such as Kernel32.exe then this file can be deleted and it will be automatically restored by the operating system.
• The same performance analysis program that the NT Servers use. This will help experienced users to isolate bottlenecks that may cause performance degradation.
• ClearType font-smoothing technology to improve LCD displays as well as improving the CRT display.
• Built-in support for Zip files.

• Realistically you must have 128 MB RAM but 256 would be better if switching between users.
• You must have well over 1 GB of free disk space for the upgrade, a realistic minimum should be 2 GB so that you still have some free space on the hard disk after the upgrade.
• A moderately fast computer is needed. At the very least you must have a 300 MHz CPU but preferably faster.
• Windows XP is protected and must be activated otherwise it will cease working after 30 days. Therefore you cannot load the same CD onto two computers. Extensive subsequent hardware changes will force a re-activation.
• You cannot upgrade from Windows 95 as it must be upgraded Windows 98 or later. This adds to the cost for Windows 95 users because you must use the full, not upgrade version that costs about $450. However, in most cases the existing hardware is likely to be inadequate for running XP and I suggest you put that money towards purchasing a new computer with XP preloaded.
• In case of problems if you have to reinstall Windows XP, all your settings as well as most of your programs, such as Microsoft Office and data, will be lost. With prior versions of Windows a reinstallation preserved all your settings and data. With my experimenting I must have inadvertently deleted or modified a file that was necessary to start Windows. Booting from the boot floppy and selecting the repair option from the XP CD I was unable to fix the problem and had to do a reinstallation. There was a warning that should I proceed, the existing configuration and even user data may be lost. As I had no option but to proceed, Windows was reinstalled but most of my other programs, including my Office XP were gone, as were most of my word processing documents and other user data. Since they were backups, this was not a big problem, but I very strongly recommend that users keep a current set of backups.
• Another disadvantage is that some older DOS programs may not run, especially some old DOS games.
• Although native support for digital cameras initially seems attractive, in practice this will be of real benefit only if you purchase a second-hand digital camera and do not receive the software. If you have an existing camera and ask XP to be the default software for it, it will disable your existing software and in all probability this will not have as many features as the camera manufacturer's software. Reinstating the original software will take a moderate amount of skill.
• Old hardware such as old flatbed scanners using the parallel port interface may not be recognised or supported by Windows XP.
• Safe Mode does not support a serial mouse, only a USB mouse.
• NTFS partitions or drives cannot be read by Windows 9x if you have a dual-boot system or if you boot from a Windows 9x floppy.
• Finally you will have some learning to do as the interface and some programs have moved or are called by a different name. For example, SCANDISK cannot be found from the Programs and Accessories menus and there is no reference to it in Help. In XP it is now called Error-checking. To run SCANDISK click on Start|My Computer, right-click on the drive, select Properties|Tools|Error-checking.

• Cannot support dual processors; that is, you can have only one CPU
• No file or folder encryption facility
• Cannot restrict access to specified programs or other resources except for the user's "My Documents" folder
• No support for many related network features that are of no real use anyway for most home users. It doesn't have features such as centralised administration and roaming profiles. The number of simultaneous users connecting via a LAN is restricted to five. NetBEUI must be manually installed requiring some networking skills.

• If your existing computer is stable, and if none of the above points are important in your case, then there should be no real need to upgrade. There will be virtually no software appearing in the near future that will run only on Windows XP and not on Windows 98. 
  Remember the saying: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
• There is no real reason to upgrade from Windows 2000 as it already has almost all of XP's features.
• If your computer has adequate resources but you are having frequent crashes, then the price of the upgrade should be worth it - the operating system core is much more stable.
• If you are sharing your computer with others and need to keep private documents or wish to limit the disk usage of other users, or are sick of the desktop and your icons being altered, then you might consider an upgrade.

[About Melbourne PC User Group]