By Ed Ellers
Microsoft recently sent out Release Candidate 1 of Windows XP – their replacement for both Windows 95, 98 and Windows Me on the one hand, and Windows NT and 2000 on the other – and it arrived at the Rainbow-PCM offices this week. Naturally, this writer could hardly wait to try it out.
We chose the Home Edition because that is what will likely be of interest to many of our readers. (The Professional Edition, which adds a lot of features that are useful in large corporate environments, keeps all the features of the Home Edition; there will also be a 64-Bit Edition to work with high-end systems based on Intel's new Itanium processor.) Since this is still a beta release, we installed it first in a "dual boot" configuration rather than upgrading over the existing Windows installation. As was the case with Windows 2000, Windows XP can easily be installed this way to allow access to both the old and new versions (in case something you need to use doesn't work right), and even gives you a boot menu that comes up when you turn on your computer to let you select the desired OS. The only catch here is that you have to install XP on a separate partition (it can be on the same drive) from the one where the existing version of Windows is installed.
If you do choose to do an upgrade installation from Windows 98 or Me – something we later tried on another system – there is an option to take XP off and go back to your previous version. (You can't upgrade from Windows 95, much less from really old versions of Windows, but it seems unlikely that anything older than Windows 98 would be used on a system new enough to handle XP.) Unlike the Windows 95, 98 and Me upgrades, an upgrade from 98 or Me to XP is actually a clean installation that transfers only application and user interface settings, so you won't have to worry about having old leftover junk fouling up the works, though in a few cases you'll need to uninstall applications before the upgrade and reinstall them afterward. (You can upgrade from Windows NT version 4.0 or Windows 2000, but only to the Professional Edition, not the Home Edition; this upgrade is done in the usual manner, not as a clean installation, and uninstall is not provided.)
The bare minimum requirement is a 233 MHz Pentium-class PC with 64 Mb of RAM, though Microsoft recommends a 300 MHz processor and 128 Mb for good performance. The system we tried it on first has a 1000 MHz AMD Athlon processor and 256 Mb of RAM. It also has an unusual Ultra DMA-100 IDE interface, and at first the Windows XP installer was freezing with what appeared to be disk errors. The solution turned out to be to obtain the Windows 2000 drivers for that controller, copy them to a floppy disk, then press the F6 key when the install program prompted for it; this let the install program take the drivers so that it could find the hard disks. After that, the installation went smoothly, though it does take a while (about an hour all told), most of which can go unattended.
Once installed, the system boots quickly and XP is ready to use in about three minutes. It's a bit scary at first because the screen is entirely blank for a large part of that time; it seems as though the system may have hung
up, but once you've done it a few times you'll be used to it. The first big surprise is the lack of desktop icons – the Recycle Bin is the only one you'll see – since Microsoft's intention is for you to use the Start Menu
all the time. (You can put icons on the desktop if you like, and there's a utility to clean up the desktop by removing less-used icons.) 
The new Start menu looks very different from that in Windows 95 and later, as you can see to the left.
The left half starts with your default Web browser and email program. Below it is a
list of your last-used applications, which may save you the trouble of drilling down into the Programs menu (now called All Programs) if you just use a few programs most of the time. Another way to do that
is to "pin" applications to the Start menu, to force them to appear under your browser and e-mail programs. (The few programs that may appear at the top of the Start Menu now will appear at the top of the All Programs menu.)
The right half has the other items found on the Start menu, such as the Control Panel, Help and Search. (Those of you who stayed with Windows 98, or even 95, should note that a number of minor changes were made in Windows Me last year, such as using the term Search instead of Find and My Network Places instead of Network Neighborhood, and those carry over to XP as well.) There are a lot of customization options for this menu, not only the usual small icons option but also options to turn on and off My Computer, My Network Places and other functions as you like, and to set the number of recent programs displayed on the left side.
And what if you don't like the new Start menu, or the new "Luna" toolbars, task bar and so on? You can switch back to the classic (4.x) Windows style toolbars, etc., switch back to the classic Start menu, or both. Here's what your Start menu could look like with the classic look but with the new Start menu left on:
The new high color icons are still used throughout Windows XP even in the classic mode, s
o it still looks somewhat "fresher" than
Windows 98 or Me. One interesting note is that the new look toolbars seem to slow things down a bit; this may not be a big deal on a really fast system, but on something down closer to the minimum
you can speed up XP by turning off most of the new enhancements. Also notice how much clearer the characters look; this is a new type of font smoothing called ClearType, which works on small type as
well as large characters and (to me at least) makes a big difference not only in readability but in overall appearance. Microsoft recommends this for flat-panel displays (both notebooks and the LCD
desktop displays that are becoming popular) and cautions that the characters "may appear slightly blurry" on tube monitors, but I found ClearType text to
be very pleasant to look at even on my old 14" monitor. (Since Windows XP runs at a minimum resolution of 800x600 except in special cases, you'll probably want to switch to large fonts if
you use a 14" or 15" monitor. For that matter, the new Start menu is so tall that even 800x600 is a bit cramped.)
Incidentally, that name on the top is the name under which you've "logged into" Windows, which you used to see next to the Log Out icon in Windows 98 or Me. Unlike Windows 2000 Professional, XP (at least in the Home Edition) doesn't force you to log in if you have only one user profile set up, as a lot of people do. If you do want to set up individual user profiles, XP Home Edition gives you a login screen on startup with picture buttons for each designated user (a feature already seen in the MSN Explorer browser). You can even switch between different users – say, to let someone else in the family quickly check their e-mail – without having to close your running applications or log out; you select the Switch User function in the Log Out menu, someone else logs in and does their thing, they log out, and when you switch back everything will be as you left it. (Switching users does drop your dial-up Internet connection, though. You can set each dial-up connection to save passwords for only a specific user or for all users.) XP also does a better job of giving each user his/her own space for files, with My Documents replaced by a Shared Documents directory and a directory for each user that holds documents, picture, audio and video files and also files for applications (such as Outlook XP) to support multiple users.
Another enhancement to the Explorer is a task menu that appears to the left of the list of files. Here's what that looks like when dealing with images saved in My Pictures:
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The Control Panel carries this even further to group items into categories:
The Explorer has also been changed to add a lot of support for ZIP files (which Windows Me could handle
to some extent, as could Windows 98 with the Plus! Pack). Not only can you ZIP and un-ZIP files directly in Explorer, but the Search function will search for files within ZIP files (as well as Microsoft's own "cabinet"
files), and ZIP files will appear as subdirectories.
Running your applications isn't really any different from Windows 95 and later. You either select them from the improved Start menu, or select All Programs and then go to the menus of programs and accessories. (Newly installed programs will appear in a different color to highlight them.) As far as application compatibility – reportedly the biggest reason that Microsoft released Windows Me last year rather than the rumored Windows 2000 Home Edition – they claim that XP has a very high level of compatibility, even with old 16-bit applications written for Windows 3.1, thanks in part to special compatibility features that can be set to emulate Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0 or Windows 2000. We'll have more to say about that when we've had a chance to install more than a few applications under XP.
The big "under the hood" advantage of XP is that, like Windows 2000, it's built on the Windows NT "kernel" which does a lot more to isolate the OS from wayward applications (and applications from each other) than Windows 95, 98 or Me can do. XP also includes a feature to prevent system files (such as DLLs) from being replaced by older versions – which some applications may do when installed – and is able to maintain multiple versions of DLLs so that an application that can't use the latest version can run with the older version that it tries to install. Other features relating to system reliability are Windows Update, which has been enhanced (as in Windows Me) to allow automatic downloading of critical updates; System Restore (also in Me) to let you roll the system back to the latest working configuration; and a similar feature that lets you return to good device drivers if a new driver for a given device causes problems.
Another area that Microsoft is still improving is installing new hardware, which in XP is the easiest I've seen yet – if your hardware is supported. One "gotcha" we ran into was with Excite@Home's USB Ethernet adapter, which XP didn't recognize on installation and for which we could not locate a Windows 2000 driver. (Most Windows 95-type device drivers won't work; Windows 2000 drivers usually will, but it's best to use drivers that have been "signed" as being compatible with Windows XP. If you use a Windows 2000 driver, you'll get a message prompting you to obtain a signed driver instead.)
I went out and bought the cheapest Ethernet card I could find for which Windows 2000 drivers were provided, and not only did Windows XP have its own drivers for that network card, but the card was ready to use with no need to restart the system. When I installed XP on this system it had asked for the computer and workgroup names, and I had already entered the names specified by @Home, so the cable modem was ready to go within a minute after the system was restarted with the new network card in place! Instead of the "found new hardware" notice you see in Windows 95/98/Me when a device is added, XP just installs the driver (assuming it's one included with Windows) and pops up a caption along the Start bar when the device is ready.
One nice thing about Windows 95 was that it had its own support for a SCSI read/write optical drive we were using at the time, which required several drivers to be added to the CONFIG.SYS file in DOS but worked in 95 the way you would hope a removable-media drive would work. Time marches on, of course, and the pleasant surprise this time was that Windows XP already had drivers for a SanDisk reader that we used to transfer digital camera images from CompactFlash cards. XP also had its own drivers for a USB-connected PostScript 3 printer that had been somewhat of a pain to install on Windows 98. It did not, however, have a driver for the SCSI card we use for Jaz drives and a scanner, so we had to obtain a Windows 2000 driver for that. The same thing happened with a Xerox inkjet printer and a Hauppauge WinTV tuner card.
When we plugged a memory card into that SanDisk reader, we got our next XP surprise – Windows searched the card, found image files (which many digital cameras "bury" under one or two levels of folders) and presented a menu of options for viewing, editing and printing pictures (the same options seen above for the My Pictures folder). When you insert a removable disk (such as a LS120, Zip or Jaz disk) you'll also get an "autorun" menu after XP checks for audio, video or image files. If you have a DV or Digital8 camcorder and use a "1394" card to copy video directly into the PC, when you plug in and switch on the camcorder you'll get an autorun menu that offers to run Windows Movie Maker for video editing; this is a very basic video editor (introduced in Windows Me) that can save either Windows Media Video (WMV) files or DV-format AVI files.
Windows Media Player 8 is built in (and will only be available with XP) and has improved support for CD recording, allowing you to record WAV, MP3 or Windows Media Audio (WMA) files to CDs that can then be played on most CD players. (If you really prefer to use the old Windows Media Player, it's still available at C:Windows Media Player\MPLAYER2.EXE.) Windows XP also lets you copy files to CD-R or CD-RW right in the Explorer; just drag the files to the recording drive as if it were a floppy disk drive, and then go to that drive and select the recording option to "burn" those files, either to a blank CD or to add them to a partially written CD. It doesn't get much easier than that!
As for networking, Windows XP Home Edition has a setup wizard to make it easy to set up a home network (as a surprising number of people are doing now) and share an Internet connection over the network; as in Windows Me, Network Neighborhood has become My Network Places and has added the ability to save favorite FTP sites). As was the case in Windows Me, XP has an option to create a setup diskette to install Internet connection sharing clients easily on Windows 95, 98 or Me systems. Business users should be aware that (like Windows Me) XP Home has only limited support for larger client/server networks, and XP Professional would usually be a better choice there.
And speaking of Internet access, Windows XP comes with version 6.0 of Internet Explorer and the Outlook Express e-mail and news client, both of which will be available for Windows 95 and later. Neither of them is drastically different from versions 5.0 or 5.5, but they do have some worthwhile enhancements. The MSN Explorer shell (which incidentally doesn't require an MSN subscription) is also included; MSN Messenger and NetMeeting have been combined into a single Windows Messenger program. Also, the Help and Support area has been extended to search Microsoft's Knowledge Base if you're on line, so you'll get the latest information on whatever you're looking for. And if you want someone you know to help you with a problem of some sort, Remote Assistance gives you exactly that capability (as long as your friend also has Windows XP) to let him/her see what you're doing and chat online with you.
And if you buy a new PC rather than upgrade your present machine to XP, the transition may not be as grueling as it has been in the past. A new Files and Settings Wizard helps you transfer your old files and settings for many applications (though not the programs themselves – you still need to reinstall them) from your old PC to your new XP-equipped system, using floppy disks, high-capacity removable disks (if you have suitable drives) or a serial cable.
It's far too early to tell whether Windows XP will be faster than Windows 98 or Me (Microsoft has said in the past that Windows 2000, XP's closest relative, is faster than 98 if you have enough RAM). We'll know more when the final version ships, but right now it appears that XP should run well on nearly all today's consumer PCs; because of its improved reliability it might also be worth considering on a machine that's not too old and with at least the 300 MHz processor and 128 Mb of RAM Microsoft recommends, though you might want to switch back to the old user interface to speed things up.
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