Well, I got WinXP installed. Only took about 30 minutes to do an install and I gave it a 10GB partition. Once I was in it took me like an hour to figure out where everything was. I spent like 5 minutes alone just staring at the new startmenu going "Where is the settings?". After the innitial shock of everything being moved around, I seem to have gotten it squared away. Here is my pro's & con's list.
Things I like:
- WMP8: The default skin OWNS if your a minimalist like me who just likes a play button and a nice area to see the movie. Deffinitely better than both WMP6 & 7.
- IE6: Same as IE5 so far, I like the cookie blocker built in as I've watched it catch almost every AD program as it tried to steal my email address. I disabled the auto-image resize though.
- Image Viewer: I paid for my own ACDSEE license, but the new version wanted me to pay more money again, so I didn't mind that XP had it's own image viewer built in. The viewer itself is quite nice also, opens up fast, minimal interface, and decent features.
- Themes: The Steel theme heavily configured is what I'm currently using and I like it a lot. I just hope XP themes get easier to configure so the masses can make some REALLY awesome ones.
- The ability to lock & unlock, that comes with every toolbar, rocks! I unlock toorbars, move them where I want them, and then lock them in place. I wish we had this at work where people always accidently move their toolbars!
- Spider Solitaire: Hey, I heard about it but never played it.... pretty fun and I won my first game 😛
- Shaded drag-selection box: Nice touch when your selecting things - easier to see what your selecting.
- Taskmanager: features a network traffic graph now, havn't really spent anytime watching it though.
- In General: Shaded menu's look really nice and whenever I rename / add a new folder it seems to auto update a lot better. Like if I install something new it auto-sorts it's program group into start/programs instead of just adding it to the bottom. Lack of refreshing contents correctly (having to constantly hit F5) was a major peeve of mine in earlier windows versions. Their is also a new mouse pointer for when you put a new CD in the drive and it is reading it for the first time (shows a little pointer with a CD where the hourglass would be).
- AND FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE HISTORY OF WINDOWS THE DEFAULT SOUND SETTINGS WERE NOT INSANELY ANNOYING. They are all small quick wav files like soft beeps / clicks. VERY nice!
Things I don't like:
[No actual programs here, just mainly random quirks]
- IE6 sometimes stacks multiple instances in the same taskbar spot. Like you would see: [Outlook][Explorer][2 Internet...]. When you click '2 Internet...' you get 2 more windows above it with titles of each IE window you had open. I havn't figured out how to disable this yet, I personally don't see a need for it.
- The default start menu had potential but fails to deliver. If I could configure it more then I would keep it but it doesn't give you many options to configure!! I told it I didn't want any recent items, and then it made the entire left side BLANK, I was hoping it would condense into 1 column. *clicks back to classic for start menu*
- I had to disable personalized menus all over again *grumble*
- Remote assistance needed to be removed, don't want that crap running in the background.
- I had to tell it to show all systray icons, otherwise it hides Inactive ones (which seems dangerous because you won't know if something is running).
- I had to tell it not to auto upgrade from MS's site - possibly stealing bandwith randomly.
- I had to look up info on this board as to remove MSN Messenger, they really made it a pain to remove.
- And the biggest concern at this current time is that I can feel some slowdown while doing things. Especially while running a game like Return to Castle Wolfenstein in a window and alt tabbing to something else. This ran better in Win2K, but I am still not done tweaking XP.
Overall, I give it a thumbs up. Had my hard drives not been dying I would probably still say it was worth the upgrade as it seems like you just have more options to work with. I havn't installed any CD writing software yet, I will see how that goes tonight. I was sort of hoping I could put EZ CD 4 on again, but maybe I will just go to Nero.
Later!
Things I like:
- WMP8: The default skin OWNS if your a minimalist like me who just likes a play button and a nice area to see the movie. Deffinitely better than both WMP6 & 7.
- IE6: Same as IE5 so far, I like the cookie blocker built in as I've watched it catch almost every AD program as it tried to steal my email address. I disabled the auto-image resize though.
- Image Viewer: I paid for my own ACDSEE license, but the new version wanted me to pay more money again, so I didn't mind that XP had it's own image viewer built in. The viewer itself is quite nice also, opens up fast, minimal interface, and decent features.
- Themes: The Steel theme heavily configured is what I'm currently using and I like it a lot. I just hope XP themes get easier to configure so the masses can make some REALLY awesome ones.
- The ability to lock & unlock, that comes with every toolbar, rocks! I unlock toorbars, move them where I want them, and then lock them in place. I wish we had this at work where people always accidently move their toolbars!
- Spider Solitaire: Hey, I heard about it but never played it.... pretty fun and I won my first game 😛
- Shaded drag-selection box: Nice touch when your selecting things - easier to see what your selecting.
- Taskmanager: features a network traffic graph now, havn't really spent anytime watching it though.
- In General: Shaded menu's look really nice and whenever I rename / add a new folder it seems to auto update a lot better. Like if I install something new it auto-sorts it's program group into start/programs instead of just adding it to the bottom. Lack of refreshing contents correctly (having to constantly hit F5) was a major peeve of mine in earlier windows versions. Their is also a new mouse pointer for when you put a new CD in the drive and it is reading it for the first time (shows a little pointer with a CD where the hourglass would be).
- AND FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE HISTORY OF WINDOWS THE DEFAULT SOUND SETTINGS WERE NOT INSANELY ANNOYING. They are all small quick wav files like soft beeps / clicks. VERY nice!
Things I don't like:
[No actual programs here, just mainly random quirks]
- IE6 sometimes stacks multiple instances in the same taskbar spot. Like you would see: [Outlook][Explorer][2 Internet...]. When you click '2 Internet...' you get 2 more windows above it with titles of each IE window you had open. I havn't figured out how to disable this yet, I personally don't see a need for it.
- The default start menu had potential but fails to deliver. If I could configure it more then I would keep it but it doesn't give you many options to configure!! I told it I didn't want any recent items, and then it made the entire left side BLANK, I was hoping it would condense into 1 column. *clicks back to classic for start menu*
- I had to disable personalized menus all over again *grumble*
- Remote assistance needed to be removed, don't want that crap running in the background.
- I had to tell it to show all systray icons, otherwise it hides Inactive ones (which seems dangerous because you won't know if something is running).
- I had to tell it not to auto upgrade from MS's site - possibly stealing bandwith randomly.
- I had to look up info on this board as to remove MSN Messenger, they really made it a pain to remove.
- And the biggest concern at this current time is that I can feel some slowdown while doing things. Especially while running a game like Return to Castle Wolfenstein in a window and alt tabbing to something else. This ran better in Win2K, but I am still not done tweaking XP.
Overall, I give it a thumbs up. Had my hard drives not been dying I would probably still say it was worth the upgrade as it seems like you just have more options to work with. I havn't installed any CD writing software yet, I will see how that goes tonight. I was sort of hoping I could put EZ CD 4 on again, but maybe I will just go to Nero.
Later!
