XP = Nothing Special - I've used it...

ScottW

ScottW

Founder
Staff member
Tonight I installed Windows XP Professional... and what a big deal it was, 65 minutes to install on a PIII 650 - 256ram and boy, was did the installation marketing make it sound like a Mac... I was really annoyed... until, that is, the installation was done.

I realized the new XP interface is a complete joke... it isn't smooth and looks like it was thrown into place without much thought... as the usual "jerky" interface of Windows, and really stinks. The XP "Theme" is stupid... in fact, I found myself liking to "Windows 2000" theme better... as for a Windows look & feel.

Its the same old system, just repackaged.

Although I wasn't too THRILLED with OS X when I first started using it... it is 100 times better than XP is.

Go Apple! :)
 
65 minutes on a 650 PIII eh ???

I can only imagine what would happen if I tried to VPC it...maybe a 3 hour instalaltion delay ??? :p

Teh funny thing is that I had to reformat both partitions and swap em (OS X was on the smaller on and I did not want that)...OS X (10.0.0) took less than 15 minutes to install :p lol :p


Admiral
 
When I use the software restore CDs on the 733 Quicksilver, it takes about 10 minutes and that is including swapping the 4 CDs.

Our of curiousity, how much drive space does the XP clean install take?
 
I think the industry has a very rude awakening in general with regard to WindowsXP. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. With OS X, Apple has attempted to engineer the basis for the best possible user experience they can provide. With WindowsXP, Microsoft has engineered a system designed to basically hold consumers up by their ankles and shake until nothing is left in their pockets.

Backlash against Microsoft is beginning to pick up steam. People are not going to be happy with the insane licensing issues that MS plans to put them through.

Everyone, (mostly financial anaysts who have tons of money stuffed into the Microsoft mattress), is predicting that XP and the new 2ghz pentium IV will "save the computer industry and pull it out of its slump." Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing is more stupid. This proves that so called analysts are just a bunch of hot air idiots with little or no practical technology management experience. The entire economy has gone to hell in a handbasket and technology managers are not a) looking to spend great deals of money on new hardware or new software, and b) certainly aren't looking to put themselves into a blackmail situation with Microsoft for the rest of eternity. Suddenly LINUX looks very attractive.


Large institutions are already beginning to use more and more LINUX, at least on the server side. As corporations and institutions become more UNIX friendly because they simply don't want to pay MS blood money, I believe the synergy between Macintosh OS X and LINUX will begin to emerge. LINUX is beautiful on servers, but it's just not ready to be handed over to the average CEO, CFO, or even CIO. Imagine these types, or Marketing VPs in a hotel room in the middle of botswana trying to configure their LINUX portable to use a local network or dial in!

Hmmm... what to do. Well what do you now! Here's Apple's OS X with its BSD UNIX roots looking and acting more like LINUX than LINUX is, in some cases, but with a user friendliness and user interface that KDE and GNOME just can match (no matter how many LINUX geeks claim that GNOME is better than Aqua.) It just isn't.

So I agree, XP isn't the big deal everyone is making it out to be. Not even if Microsoft and pals spend a billion dollars marketing it.

Don't forget, IBM is spending a billion dollars marketing and developing LINUX.
 
AFAIK Win2k doesn't have an expiration date. Who is going to be pressured to upgrade except IT quacks--er I mean 'pros' who depend on Microsoft tech support?

The only people who I've heard personally and have read who promote upgrading are tech support people who get money doing this crap. That isn't only because they have been preened my MS HQ ever since XP was announced. Do they really think WinXP is going to make their jobs easier, perhaps even make them obsolete?

Same old same old
 
I am beta testing RC2 right now. While it is more stable than any Microsoft program I have used, the whole product activation thing pisses me off. I only have one computer. Say I don't like the CD-RW drive and want to put the DVD drive back in. Should I have to pray and cross my fingers, hoping that it does not ask me to reactivate.

MS should at the very least sell XP as a three-activation product meaning you could install XP on three computers.

Reason #2 that I don't like it, the interface looks as if it was ripped off of MSN.

Reason three, no plug in support. So everyone has to use Active X and .NET instead of Java and plugins, which are estabolished standards? They'll try hard to replace HTML and PDF with .NET standards as well.

Plus, my personal info going to Redmond? I think not. My first eXPerience with Windows was bad (remember 3.0?), but at least back then I did not have to worry about being grabbed by the nuts by MS.

Now the only dilemma I face is to convince my parents that Apple is a viable alternative to MS when I go off to school on my own and get my own computer. If my parents say they will only buy IBM (wtf? this isn't 1984.), then I'll just pass.

They'll see the light when the DOJ bites Microsoft and Monkey Boy right where it hurts. :D

This URL might help, though. I won't mention Apple for a while, not until they truly see how diabolical MS truly is.

Hoping XP backfires on Monkey Boy,

Ryan Fraley
Chester, IL
 
At the moment, when I do my web developing (its a hobby) I dont give a fudge about M$ browsers/support. It is at the bottom of my list. I code standard W3C HTML, Javascript and whatnots and then if it doesnt work I try to fix it.

If M$ trried to reaplce a standard with its crap, that it the point I wont give a fudge about M$ Period. All my friends can bitch and moan that they cannot see my web page... I will tell em the same thing I told em when I wrote in greek. I use ISO 8859-7 an international standard, not the windows 1257 greek.


Admiral
 
At the moment, when I do my web developing (its a hobby) I dont give a fudge about M$ browsers/support. It is at the bottom of my list. I code standard W3C HTML, Javascript and whatnots and then if it doesnt work I try to fix it.

If M$ trried to reaplce a standard with its crap, that it the point I wont give a fudge about M$ Period. All my friends can bitch and moan that they cannot see my web page... I will tell em the same thing I told em when I wrote in greek. I use ISO 8859-7 an international standard, not the windows 1257 greek.
Click to expand...

Sadly, few people think like you. If people understood the value of industry wide standards and stopped doing whatever Microsoft said do, I'm convinced the economy wouldn't be in the shape it's in today.

Don't underestimate Microsoft though. It appears they may have even found a way to take over TCP/IP.

For an absolutely chilling take on this,

Please see: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010802.html

"...Programmers who ought to be familiar with Microsoft's plans have suggested that the real motive for raw socket support is for Microsoft to use Windows XP to exploit a bad situation, to deliberately make things worse.

According to these programmers, Microsoft wants to replace TCP/IP with a proprietary protocol -- a protocol owned by Microsoft -- that it will tout as being more secure."

"...How do you push for the acceptance of a new protocol? First, make the old one unworkable by placing millions of exploitable TCP/IP stacks out on the Net, ready-to-use by any teenage sociopath. When the Net slows or crashes, the blame would not be assigned to Microsoft. Then ship the new protocol with every new copy of Windows, and install it with every Windows Update over the Internet. Zero to 100 million copies could happen in less than a year, and that year could be prior to the new protocol even being announced. It could be shipping right now..."
 
I've read that article and quite frankly I am appauled. I think that there is going to be some backlash at M$ at some point when people realize that M$ is grabbing them by the nuts.

I stand firmly behind my claim, and if people cannot see what I make then tough shite... most people who use M$ products, well categorically and unequivocally without question that is, are duffuses that want to show that they know something about computers when in reallity they know jack shite.

Someone needs to give them some REAL computer/programming experince to cut their wind.


Admiral
 
Kudos, Admiral, for coding to standards. Ironically, MSIE supports the most standards, so it still makes for the most pleasing web surfing experience!

-Rob
 
Originally posted by rfraley
I am beta testing RC2 right now. While it is more stable than any Microsoft program I have used, the whole product activation thing pisses me off. I only have one computer. Say I don't like the CD-RW drive and want to put the DVD drive back in. Should I have to pray and cross my fingers, hoping that it does not ask me to reactivate.
Click to expand...

You can replace up to four parts until it wants a new activation key.
That may change till the final comes, from what I have heard, Microsoft is going to loosen that a bit.

I don't know why you all are bitching about the interface. If you like the old Win 2000 theme more, then use it. XP is skinnable, something you can't do with OS X right now.

For the data that goes through the wire on activation:

5 kB are sent to Microsoft, not 2MB like some people mention.
That is not so much data, is it?

Oh boy, I hate to sound like a Microsoft lover. I am not even using XP.
But I just can't stand this whole misinformation that is going around on XP.
 
5K. That's a lot of information considering zero is a more acceptable value, or maybe 300 bytes to cover name, email address, and daytime phone number.

-Rob
 
I disagree completely with the first post in this thread.

I have used XP RC-1 and RC-2, and I really enjoy it. I find the interface to be nicer than any other windows to date. (also, when u make a point, it's better to use specific examples instead of broad statements).

I showed my mother windows XP RC-2. She is a computer novice, who just bought her own eMachine. She got a free xp upgrade coupon for when the OS comes out in october. Anyway, getting back to my point, she adored the new interface. It made more sense to her than any past windows interface that she has seen (she tried using windows 9x on my dad's machine and she hated it.)

The install took me half an hour (though i have a P III 800 EB with an ATA/100 controller and 380 something MB of ram that i built) and i thought it was painless for the most part (compared to what i had to do in the past for reinstalling older versions of windows.) Did you who say the install took forever try and convert your drive to NTFS before installing? If so, how big is your drive? If you did convert your file system to NTFS, that could be why it took almost an hour. Doing anything to a HD like that takes hours. Reguardless of what software you are using.

Others have said that the new interface is a rip off of the MSN interface... that's the point. As a part of Microsoft's new .NET strategy, everything is made to look like everything else. it's streamlining the interface so that it makes things easier for new users.

I do agree that the product activiation sucks majorly. But, it took like 3 seconds. and I told it what it was allowed to send. Plus, my computer can't connect directly to any "Big Brother" style microsoft server 'cause i'm behind my school's excessively potent firewall. I see it as bad, but i see where they are coming from. Left and right people are bootlegging their software. At my school, there is more piracy then i've ever seen before. People hand around their Office and Windows CDs like they were not-quite-empty pizza boxes.

In conclusion, I think XP is a step in the right direction for MS. There are some really awful "features" that they still will be forced to deal with (if our favorite Texan doesn't pull the plug on the DOJ) but I really enjoy the OS.
 
Geez...you think this forum would be patronizing any potential Apple user. Windows XP beta is stable (for the most part) and is step in the right direction as far as the UI goes, but it seems that MS might be blowing their cover on this one. 5k can be a pretty long text file. You could write a basic two page summary of a person's life with a 5 k text file.

Plus the whole "raw sockets" thing bugs me as well.

COME ON FOR THE LOVE OF GOD I AM THINKING OF GOING APPLE!!! Someone give me support here, not criticism. MS is trying to rule the world, and should go the way of Standard Oil and AT&T.
 
LOL forget about this joker.
Go with apple. Better HW/software integration, more stable base, no registration bs, and apple givea a F*ck about your security.
(No wonder the pentagon switched some of its more sensetive machines to OS X server)

Admiral
 
Ha ha ha :p
Good one...there is nothing more unstable than a windows app...
well...maybe a windows app running on windows which is on a computer that is on top of an unstable volcano ready to explde :p

well..I overdid it :p


Admiral
 
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