Software Review: Windows XP Beta Test

Windows XP
Beta 2, build 2428
"Whistler" professional edition

May 10, 2001 Software Review



Updated:
5/10/01
5/11/01
5/12/01 XP Games: 4 for 0, IE and OE 6
5/15/01 2nd draft
5/16/01 Restore, Task Monitor, Defrag, Summary, proofed
5/18/01 Compatibility Mode, rollovers, proofed
5/19/01
5/20/01 Mouse
5/31/01 Posted this file and began reformatting it's text

Installing/upgrading details, please.

Installing this thing was a friggin' nightmare. You have a choice of a full "clean" installation or an upgrade. I tried to do the full into it's own folder because I wanted the option of dual-boot but that method wouldn't work at all. Gave me tons of Can't Find so-and-so File errors during the process. Doing the upgrade still reported two missing files during the install, a .ttf and a .dll (during multiple tries). After that, it would allow me to get to the Windows login screen but not let me enter further. I had to boot into safe mode and change a registry entry. Then all was fine.

To this day, still no signs of trouble yet about those two "missing" files.

No beta lives forever, right?

Wrong. I believe that one change I had to make to the registry deactivated Microsoft's "Activation Rule." XP has not once asked or reminded me to activate this setup since. I haven't even had to register it. Don't tell anyone.

Is it faster than my 98 setup?

Too early to tell but I can tell you it's not terribly slower. And after only three days of playing with it, I've gotten it to boot, shut down, open folders and launch applications quicker and more efficiently than the default settings with only minor "tweaking."

After deactivating many of XP's desktop special effects and lowering the amount of programs loaded during startup, the speed difference is now negligible (if there at all). Generally, applications and processes seem to run quicker (i.e., loading a website or switching a Word doc) but the startups and shutdowns still mostly come at the getting-old rates of Windows 9x's of year's past. Why does booting the computer still take over a minute? Why, in XP, does it take my modem 15 seconds to disconnect from a simple ISP connection? There are waits when the whole system seems to just sit there doing nothing.

One reason for this may be that XP wants RAM and plenty of it. Running just the operating system, Microsoft Word and a utility called TweakAll occupied almost 100 MBs of RAM. Just booting up swipes 70 MBs from my dear old motherboard. Running this OS on a 128 MB system, as I am, might simply not be enough and might explain these pauses. System requirements for XP have not yet been released so there's no way to tell if what I'm witnessing is good or bad behavior

Another explanation may be that XP is in fact computing something in the background and we're just not aware of it. This is 100% brand new code for the home user, folks (this iteration has nothing to do with the previous ME, 98 or 95), and there's a lot going on behind the scenes of it. Like Windows ME before it, XP comes with a handy System Restore feature that lets users restore their system settings to a happier, more workable time if their system should become too unstable. For instance, whenever you go ahead and do something that XP has recommended you don't, XP automatically saves a restore point. This situation usually ends up with your OS giving you one of those I-told-you-so looks while you sheepishly restore your computer to one hour before you fearlessly changed three drivers and deleted four items from Device Manager. This, of course, takes time to do (1-2 minutes) but the system never gives any indication that it's doing it. I'm betting that at least some of these hanging pauses are a result of the invisible execution of this feature. That's but a small price to pay for getting your seemingly unbootable computer back to perfect working order in less than 30 minutes.

Also always running is the Task Monitor, the much bigger brother of Win 9x's feeble Close Program box. You remember the Close Program box, don't you? It was that thing that sometimes might come up if you pressed CTRL, ALT + DEL at the same time. In it was a list of programs that were currently running (usually with the phrase "not responding" to the right of them). The idea was that you'd highlight the problem program and hit End Task and Windows would close the program and supposedly let you go on with your work. But sometimes it would misunderstand and shut down all instances of that application (if, for instance, you were working in multiple browsers or Word docs). And my favorite result: sometimes it didn't work at all but instead just flat out froze your system even deeper. Well, the Task Monitor eliminates all that nonsense. Just some of it's improvements are that it lists CPU and memory usage next to every application running (or animated bar graphs if you'd rather see it that way), tells you who on your system is currently running that program, lets you log off that user or shutdown, restart or go into hibernation mode. Enable this thing to free up RAM and it'd be the only system monitoring utility you'd need.

While we're on the subject of improvements, it's nice to finally have back the option to see how defragmented our drives are before making the decision to go through the time-intensive deed. This small feature hasn't been seen since Win 95 and I can't for the life of me figure out why Microsoft ever took it away. One more thing: there's no more Scan Disk. XP will run it after a bad shutdown but it's no longer in your power to perform one. I'm assuming this is now being done invisibly and automatically before every defrag. If so, why weren't these two similar cleansing utilities combined earlier?

Also in the what-were-they-waiting-for category is a simple desktop mouse rollover that now gives you almost as much information as opening an icon's property box. Hold the mouse over a Word doc and you'll see its file type, author, title, date last modified and how large it is. Hold the mouse over a shortcut to an application and it will tell you exactly where it leads. Hold it over a folder and it'll tell you how much hard drive space all the files in it are taking up. In Windows, any new feature that saves us about 900,000 mouse clicks a year should be cherished. This is one of them.

Is it really "crash-proof?"

Almost, but not quite. Had one or two nice ones so far where I had to shut down cold. But I see now that these crashes were simply the result of me telling XP to do something it didn't want to do. XP warned me I shouldn't do what I foolishly went ahead and did and gave me a rock solid lock-up as a lesson. Having said that, in normal day-to-day operations, I've never lost control of the mouse once. I've not experienced one lock-up, one random crash, one blue screen of death or one "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" since install. I've also not once been disconnected from the Internet (5-19-01: scratch that, I've been disconnected once in 14 days). This is a huge noticeable improvement in stability over my last Windows 98 setup.

Any trouble with games?

Not much. Two of the three games I tested first ran fine with no effort whatsoever. But for when you do come across something difficult, XP now has a brand-new Compatibility Mode in which you can attempt to run a problem program in a simulated 95/98/ME/NT/2000 environment (that may be better suited to what the programmers had in mind at the time). And once you find a proper compatibility mode for that application, XP will update that program's shortcut and run it in that mode from here on in with no more effort on your part required. Disabling that boot process is as simple as bringing up said shortcut's property box and unchecking Run In Compatibility Mode. My experiences with this new feature so far have been great! Some notes:

XP is very picky with Microsoft-approved drivers and thusly assigned my Nvidia TNT2 video card an MS driver for that chipset. Graphic-intensive first person shooters like Serious Sam and Undying didn't like this driver and both failed to load. But now I have no other legitimate options to get a MS approved vidcard driver cause XP is too new and no companies are posting them yet. I changed vidcard driver to the card's manufacturer's Windows 2000 version and tried SS again. NO GO. I ran it again but this time in XP's Compatibility Mode. Bingo. Runs fine, tastes great and goes down easy. Ditto Undying.

Any trouble with any applications?

No, there has not been one program I've not been able to run.

So, why'd you do it?

Most honest answer is because I could.

Plus:

The System Restore (details above): The feature even lets you set "restore points," giving you total say in when saves are made and control over how far you must go back in time to get your computer in working, bootable order. I believe this feature will prove indispensable and it's already saved my bacon more than I care to admit. Invaluable, introduced in Windows ME.

Remote Access: Kind of like a built in PC Anywhere in which I could connect to your computer through the Internet and make actual changes to your system by controlling your mouse (think of how much easier this would make my job). But since I don't know anyone that has XP yet, I've not had a chance to try it : ( Not tested.

Microsoft thinks the above-mentioned Compatibility Mode so important that it just made this feature available to owners of Windows 2000 in a 100 MB downloadable patch. This feature effectively enables Windows NT obsolete. Invaluable.

Through Windows XP, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express get upgraded to version 6 (available as a free download at MS's site). While I see no change whatsoever in OE, IE offers plenty of decent new features. Most importantly, it allows you to manage images on websites much easier. Hold your pointer over a picture and a small toolbar pops up. With one left click of the mouse, you can save, print or email it instantly. IE also now resizes images to reflect the size of the browser. Open a picture in only a partially opened IE and it shows you a thumbnail instead of that partial corner of the yellow curtain behind George Clooney's head from that cover of People you want so badly. For anyone that needs to manipulate many pics in a short amount of time (webmasters or porn-viewers, for two), this is a godsend. Useful update, available as a free download.

The OS also makes it extremely easy to configure different Windows settings for many users (think Outlook Express' identities). This will be very handy to you manly men who share theirs w/ a wife or to parents who wish to protect their kid's eyes from sensitive material. Have a curious youngster not yet ready for the 'net? Setup a profile for him that doesn't even have Dial Up Networking on it. Tired of your roommate's 100 icons on the desktop? Setup up your own and then don't even put a My Computer icon on it if you don't want to. Useful for a 2+ person household.

XP is much more customizable and offers a completely new interface called Luna. This offers "smart" folders, toolbars, taskbar and start menu that remember what programs you used most recently and thus re-positions them accordingly, making them easier to get to than the old standard list. And as with almost every new feature described in this paper, you always have the choice of turning something off or simply just defaulting to "classic view."

In fact, maybe the greatest thing about XP is that it eliminates the need for many various third-party programs you were forced to use to do things Windows couldn't. System Restore eliminates the need for a "ghosting" back-up application, Remote Access a networking application and Compatibility Mode a dual-boot setup. Windows Media Player 8 now plays DVDs (untested). Windows Movie Maker is a full-fledged video editor (untested) and Internet Explorer 6 now includes some basic instant-messaging features. The hard drive space, headaches and hassles you save by now being able to do all the above in Windows alone is unbelievable and you'll never understand how you lived like you did back in '98-Land.

Quirks?

A few.

The mouse driver XP assigned me during install doesn't let me assign a function to the wheel. Normally, I had that set as double-click so I could open any document with just one press and now not having that option annoys me. This was curious as the item in question is a standard Microsoft Wheelmouse. Taking a que from the message boards, I attempted to install Logitec's latest Windows 2000 driver. No go and a locked up system to boot. Downloading and then installing Microsoft's own latest driver eventually proved to be the answer and gave me back total control of buttons and other functions that the initial driver didn't

Outlook Express would work in one of my XP identities but not another. After importing settings to working identity, I simply deleted the problem one and went on with life.

The system crashed when I tried to install Office 2000. Deleting Office folders left from a previous install solved this completely. Word, Excel and Outlook 2000 now run flawlessly.

No matter the length of your password, it shows up as 16 *'s in dialers. This makes it especially hard to spot incorrectly entered ID.

In the beta copy I have, a comments link is embedded into the top blue bar of every browser and folder (to make sending reports to Microsoft as easy as possible). This was easily disabled with one change in the registry.

No driver whatsoever for my Lexmark 1000 and so therefore no printing. Obviously, this is a BIG drawback and originally I was not sure if it was Microsoft or Lexmark that was acting slow on the draw. This turns out to be Lexmark's problem, as they simply don't support this model printer above Windows ME. But because XP is still five months away from an official release, I have no right to criticize the lack of available support for this old crappy printer. I could have also gone to Microsoft's site and found this out before installing. They've posted a hardware compatibility list (http://www.microsoft.com/hcl/) which tells you up front what will and won't work with this new OS. Its straightforward and honest, as I believe Microsoft would rather you don't buy XP than get it and be dissatisfied with it.

Check the list twice, is what I say, because you're going to want this to work. This is finally the perfect merging of the stability of NT/2000 coupled with the compatibility of Windows 9x. This is what we've waited seven years for and is what we've always wanted. Hell, it's what we've always needed. This is the one we'll all have to finally upgrade to. Forget the worthlessness of Windows 98 Second Edition and Millennium. This is the real thing and it's hitting store shelves October 26th, 2001.

Pricing has yet to be announced.




APPENDIX 1


Working Programs:

Applications: Excel 2000, Internet Explorer 6, Outlook 2000, Outlook Express 6 and Word 2000.
Games: Black and White, Darkstone, Longest Journey, Nocturne, Serious Sam and Clive Barker's Undying.
Utilities: TweakAll 2.0.

Non-Working Programs:

None found as of yet.


APPENDIX 2

Tweaks:

To disable the comments link in all folders and browsers, set the value of
My Computer \ HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Control Panel \ Desktop \ LameButtonEnabled in the registry to zero.


APPENDIX 3

Time Statistics:

Startup:
1:15 (auto login)

Restart:
1:55 minutes (w/CD in drive)
1:40 (auto login)
1:40 (auto login)

Shutdown:
35 seconds

All tests performed with only volume control loaded into System Tray.