Review: Windows XP - Upgrader's view
David Dorn looks at just what an upgrade from Windows Me to XP entails
| Product | Windows XP |
|---|---|
| Company | Microsoft |
| Web | www.microsoft.com/uk |
| Price | Home £180 (upgrade £90), Professional £260 (Upgrade £170) |
| We like | Stable, lots of new features. |
| We don't like | Product Activation. |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
Before I get stuck into this, let me say one thing from the very start; I've found, over the years, that "upgrading" a current Windows installation to the next iteration to be fraught with problems, and my usual advice is to make a full backup, wipe the drive, and start again from scratch.
On this occasion, however, I'd decided that it was time to go the upgrade route to get Windows XP installed onto my main machine. I'd already made backups (note the plural) of all my data files, and, just before I slipped the XP CD into the drive, wrote the contents of "My Documents" to CD, just to be on the safe side.
The actual install process is pretty painless, with the caveat that I ran the useful (if not very brightly signposted) "Will your machine work with XP" utility to check what I'd need new drivers for. Not all that surprisingly, the Alcatel Frog that my ADSL connection runs over was flagged, as were both printers I use on a daily basis, as well as my scanner. One control panel utility for the inbuilt sound card in the machine was flagged as being unusable, and Zone Alarm would need a re-install.
Aside from that, the only other caveat was that I'd need to re-install Microsoft Outlook. I'd already decided that wasn't going to happen anyway!
Thus it was that I spent 73 minutes watching as the installer did its stuff and copied across the new operating system. I'd already downloaded new driver files for the Frog and one printer, and promptly upgraded them once the incredibly boring upgrade process had completed.
And here, of course, was where the problems started
Incompatible, unsigned
Microsoft has adopted a scheme of "signing" for drivers - flagging them as being, if you like, "approved". Guess what? The Alcatel XP compliant version of the Frog drivers trigger XP's sirens and warnings. "Unsigned" "Not Recommended!" "Are you Sure?" I just told it to get on with it anyway, and I'd sort out the mess later. After all, I'm as much good as a chocolate teapot without a working 'Net connection - the ADSL is vital, so the driver had to go in, whether MS likes it or not.
There's an upgrade to Zone Alarm that gives it XP compatibility, so that was the very next port of call - I hate the idea of not having my firewall up and running, even if XP promises to give you one of its own. It's nothing to do with the MS firewall being bad, as such, it's just that I know Zone Alarm is good, and works, and I see no need to experiment with anything else, especially on my main machine.
The upshot of it all is that I've got an ADSL connection working, and Zone Alarm protecting it, but the rest of my carefully sorted network settings have all been shot to bits.
Windows XP does not support NETBEUI, so everything's based on TCP/IP. Whereas under Windows Me I'd got a nice little Internet Connection Sharing setup running, so far I've been unable to get XP to handle it. It looks as if I'll need to establish one of the other machines on the network as the sharing gateway, one which will take the previous incarnation of the Alcatel Frog's drivers, which seem to be the problem here.
Speed
Now, the machine on which all of this has happened is a Pentium 4 1.7GHz machine. XP is optimised for Pentium 4, whereas prior versions of Windows would actually run more slowly on Intel's top end processors. I've got to say that the increase in performance is huge - it feels twice as fast as it did before I did the upgrade, and I haven't even converted the filing system to NTFS as yet (and I'm not sure that I will, either).
I've decided that I don't like the "hand holding" new interface. For me, it's counter-productive, as I'm searching all over for stuff I have been able just to put my hands on quickly. So, within half an hour of getting machine back up and running, I'd switched everything that I could back to "Classic" mode and got rid of that awful landscape photo that MS provides as the standard XP Theme background. It's a blessing to see the back of the really rather strange colour scheme that the "new look" uses as well.
Nice bits
I've had one or two programs complain at me - AOL 6 for one, decided that I was using the wrong version, and needed the XP version. That was fine, I downloaded, installed, and everything's as smooth as a baby's botty - but not until I'd spent a good half hour running the old version first ' and I do know of folks who just ignore the pop-up warning and carry on regardless.
A couple of other programs decided not to run correctly, and crashed. The good news is that they didn't take the whole system with them (they used to when they died under Win 98 and Win Me) and let me keep on keeping on.
I rather like the fade-in and out menus, the whole system seems, as I said, a lot faster, multiple logon personalities are a doddle to set up, and every bit of MS software I run seems to be behaving rather better than if did before. The system seems a whole lot more stable than Me was (not a particularly hard trick to perform, admittedly), and I reckon it's been a worthwhile exercise.
However... I think I shall be investing in a new hard disk for this machine, which will become the default boot disk, and I think I'll be installing XP on it from scratch, rather than as an upgrade. Somewhere deep in the back of my mind, I still don't trust an upgrade install.!
Read Dave Cook's in-depth series of reviews of XP
