Anyone who has ever complained about Windows' tendency to crash – and that includes almost everyone who's used Windows 95, 98 or Me – is in for a treat in Windows XP. XP is built around the tried-and-true Windows NT/2000 core. This core provides a solid base which, while not crashproof, greatly increases the operating system's reliability.
XP features protected kernel-mode architecture, a mind-numbing term which, to the mere mortals among us, means that applications are prevented from interfering with the operating system's code. XP also allocates each program its own protected memory space – much like a private playpen – to prevent applications from tripping over one another.
Add to this support for side-by-side components, allowing dynamic link libraries (DLLs) with the same name used by different applications to co-exist, and you get an operating system which is remarkably resilient. XP also uses Windows File Protection to prevent important system files from being overwritten or altered by newly installed applications.
You don't need to understand all the terminology to recognise the results: XP remains up and running even when hit by problems which would bring Windows 9x to its knees. While applications may still crash, they won't take your system down with them.
This vastly improved stability is the big story for anyone upgrading from Win 98/Me. But the story doesn't end there – XP is stuffed with new features, big and small.
The new look
Wrapped around the NT core is a new and gorgeous look. Icons are glowing and translucent; menus and mouse pointers have shadows; the Taskbar is multi-coloured with rounded edges; the Start menu has been entirely redone.
The new style is bulkier than previous versions, with the default icons and windows taking more desk space. Although bulky, the look is clean. In fact, if you do a clean install your desktop will be devoid of icons except the Recycle Bin, with everything else tucked into the Start menu. And if you start cluttering up your desktop with icons, the Desktop Cleanup Wizard will pop up every now and then and offer to sweep infrequently-used icons into an Unused folder.
The XP Desktop in its virgin state is uncluttered and colourful.
You don't have to stick with the standard XP look. Almost everything in the interface is mix-and-match. Use the old-style Explorer look with the new Start menu; select large or small icons; tailor most aspects of the interface to suit your needs. A feature called Styles lets you change the look of the whole interface, from Taskbar to scrollbars.
All this eye candy and the cool special effects such as sliding taskbar buttons, fade in/fade out menus, and so on come at a cost. Unless you have a fast processor and lots of RAM on your video card, you'll want to turn many of these features off. The neat thing is you can pick and choose almost any of the elements.
A smarter Taskbar
The Taskbar has received some serious attention. Apart from its new look, its behaviour has been improved. The System Tray, now renamed the Notification Area, automatically hides any icons you haven't used recently, saving space. You can also nominate which icons should be hidden and which should remain permanently visible.
Taskbar buttons auto-sort into related groups, with folder buttons side by side, Word documents next to one another, and so on. When the Taskbar starts to fill up, like items are clumped together with a pop-up menu providing access to each.
Lastly, the Taskbar is locked in position – something that will save many beginners a lot of frustration. You can, of course, change this setting if you wish.
Easier file management
File management – never one of Windows' strengths – gets a big boost with the new task-focussed Explorer. Folders now sport task panes on the left, with the folder's contents displayed to the right. The particular task panes displayed and the contents of each pane morph to reflect your current activity.
XP automatically identifies the contents of disks you insert and offers a menu of options.
For instance, click a word processing document in the My Documents folder, and you'll see a File And Folder Tasks pane with the following clickable actions: Rename, Move, Copy, Publish to the Web, E-mail, Print, Delete. There's also an Other Places pane which lets you jump directly to the Desktop, Shared Documents (on systems used by more than one person), My Computer and My Network Places. You can drag-and-drop files and folders to any of the Other Places, making it a snap to move files. Finally, there's a Details pane, giving information about the selected file.
XP encourages you to organise your files by content type. As well as My Documents, there are special folders for My Pictures, My Music and My Video, each with its own specialised task pane offering content-specific options, such as View As A Slideshow or Copy All Items To Audio CD or Play. Not only that, if you create a new folder and the first item you place in it is a graphic, then that folder automatically gains a Picture Tasks pane (in addition to the File And Folder Tasks pane); if the first item is a music file, the folder gains a Music Tasks pane; if it's a movie file, the folder sprouts a Video Tasks pane. So it makes sense to group such files together and get the benefit of the specialised task pane.
| geekgirl.tip: Using folder templates |
If you create a folder and then
decide you'd like to change its type it – to music, picture, video,
and so on – it's easy to do:
|
Oh, and if you prefer the old Explorer-style folder tree, a click of a button activates it in place of the task panes.
Look for other file management improvements throughout XP, such as the File and Settings Transfer Wizard, which facilitates moving files, documents and settings from one computer to another.
My multimedia
The My Music, My Pictures and My Video folders are an indication that this new Windows is keen on multimedia. A closer look at the My Pictures folder, for example, shows that in addition to regular files tasks, with a single click you can:
- view the folder contents as a slideshow
- order prints of your photos online
- print photos
- set a photo as your wallpaper
- copy photos to CD
The photo printing wizard steps you through creating anything from a set of contact prints to full-size images. If you select a photo and then choose the E-mail task, XP offers to resize the images to make them more suitable for e-mailing. Such touches abound, and you'll find equivalent options with music and video files.
XP comes with Windows Media Player 8, a marked improvement on its predecessor. WMP 8 features improved loading and performance and a sensibly organised task-centred interface. If you have a DVD drive, WMP 8 provides comprehensive controls for playing DVDs. And if you have a high-speed Internet connection, you can download streaming video and play it full screen.
More on the multimedia front: XP includes integrated CD burning.
Scanner support is better than ever and there's expanded support for digital cameras. Unfortunately, despite several improvements, Movie Maker is still remarkably underpowered. It provides a good introduction to video editing for beginners, but videophiles will hanker for more. New to Movie Maker is an uncompressed AVI mode for full-screen video.
Sharing your computer
If you share a computer with others, XP is a marvel. Creating separate user logins is built into the setup routine, and XP keeps all your settings and files carefully separated. Using the User Accounts applet in the Control Panel, you can restrict access for young users and create a guest account with limited access so neighbours can't snoop around.
Fast user switching lets you leave your own programs running while someone else jumps on the computer for a while. Once they're off, you can dive back in exactly where you left off.
If you are the sole user of your computer, you can get fast auto-login by creating only a single user with no password. You may still find it handy to add a guest account, so others may have restricted use of your computer, and you'll find it's easy to activate or deactivate the guest account.
XP also makes it far, far easier to set up a home network. Once a task to be dreaded, XP's Network Setup Wizard makes the software side of setting up a network simple. Internet Connection Sharing, which lets multiple users share a single Internet link, is back and with it XP introduces the Internet Connection Firewall, to help protect your computer from outside attacks by hackers when you're connected to the Internet.
Fast user switching makes it easy to share a computer.
Self-help
Help has been rebuilt from the ground up. If you've tended to avoid Windows' built-in help in the past, give a try now. The Help and Support Center, as Windows' help is now called, has more information, more clearly written, all accessible via an improved search engine. If you're online, the Help and Support Center integrates with other support documents, including those in Microsoft's vast Knowledge Base.
You should even notice an improvement in the error messages which Windows displays. A lot of effort went into improving these messages during the beta testing of XP, and it shows in friendlier, more meaningful and more interactive error messages.
Remote Assistance
The brightest new support feature is Remote Assistance. With it, a friend or support tech can remotely control your computer to help troubleshoot a problem, or to demonstrate how to accomplish a particular task.
You can initiate a Remote Assistance session through Windows Messenger, via a direct e-mail invitation, or via an e-mailed attachment.
If you ask someone for help using Remote Assistance, the person providing assistance gains control of your computer (you'll be relieved to hear you can interrupt this control at any time by pressing the Esc key). During your Remote Assistance session, you can communicate with the other person via a chat window on your Desktop.
Internet Explorer 6
Windows XP comes with the latest version of Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer 6, in residence. IE 6 is not a big step up from IE 5.5 and it has been available for download for some time to users of other Windows operating systems. But when run on XP, it gains an entirely different look.
The most noticeable addition to IE 6 is the Media Bar. From it you can connect to a variety of online media resources, listen to music clips and radio stations, and view video clips. While it's the most obvious change in Internet Explorer, the Media Bar is less than compelling. It's clearly intended to funnel users to Microsoft-owned content online, with most links taking you directly to MSN sites.
Not as obvious as the Media Bar but of great use are the new security and privacy features of IE 6. Chief among these is improved handling of cookies, with new settings to let you control cookies on a site-by-site basis.
Internet Explorer takes your privacy protection one step further by providing privacy reports, based on a standard called Platform for Privacy Preferences Project – P3P for short. Under P3P, every site can establish a privacy policy which can be read automatically by the browser. IE 6 lets you view such reports.
Other new features include an Image Toolbar, for printing, e-mailing and saving Web-based graphics; auto-resizing of graphics in the browser window; improved Print Preview; and, for Web developers, better support for Web standards such as Cascading Style Sheets, Level 1 (CCS1) and the Document Object Model Level 1 (DOM1).
Windows Messenger
Windows Messenger is a revamped version of Microsoft's standalone instant messaging program, MSN Messenger. Messenger not only provides instant messaging, it also lets you exchange files, video-conference, and share a virtual whiteboard with other Messenger users. Windows Messenger makes it easy to initiate or participate in a Remote Assistance session, as well.
XP handles audio and video more efficiently than earlier versions of Windows, something which becomes apparent when you're using Windows Messenger.
| geekgirl.tip: Shoot the Messenger! |
| If you don't use Windows
Messenger, you'll find it awfully hard to switch off. Microsoft is hell
bent on getting us all to use it as part of it's .NET push (see What the !@#$* is .NET?
for more on this topic) and so it has made it hard to disable.
Hard, but not impossible. Here's how you can eliminate Windows Messenger. But please note – this technique involves editing the Registry, something I do not recommend for the inexperienced!
|
The Search Companion
Window's search facility has been completely revamped. As in earlier versions of Windows, the search program lets you locate files, folders and other items on your computer, a network, or the Internet. XP's Search Companion provides a wizard style approach, complete with an animated character of your choice. It's great for beginners and occasional users; experienced users are certain to want to visit the Change Preferences section to turn most of the 'help' off.
The new Indexing Service makes searches faster. The Indexing Service runs in the background, indexing the properties and content of the files on your computer. This process speeds up any searches you perform, but can slow your computer down at other times. On low powered computers you may wish to turn the Indexing Service off.
Safe drivers
Uncooperative drivers have been the bane of many a Windows user's existence. XP has two features which eliminate most driver problems.
The first is Windows Driver Protection. Microsoft keeps a database of known 'problem' drivers, a database which you can update using the Windows Update feature. If you try to install one of these notorious drivers, XP leaps into the fray and stops you in your tracks. It offers to let you connect to the Internet and locate updated drivers, or cancel the whole operation.
The second XP driver enhancement is Driver Rollback. Whenever you install a new driver, XP makes a copy of the old driver. If you encounter problems after the installation, you can restore the old driver.
| geekgirl.technote: What's a driver? |
| A driver is a piece of software which tells your operating system how to interact with a particular hardware device: a video card, a modem, a printer, a soundcard, and so on. Out of date, corrupt, missing or incompatible drivers not only cause problems for the associated device, but they can cause major hiccoughs in the operating system which can be hard to diagnose. |
Last good configuration
After each successful startup, XP saves your configuration settings. If you then tinker with your hardware or software and find you can't even get Windows to start, you can use the Last Known Good Configuration option, available when you boot your system, to restore your system to the last configuration which booted successfully. Even if that configuration had other problems (hardware not working, for instance), you'll be able to access Windows in order to troubleshoot your system.
Faster startup
If you hate waiting, you'll enjoy XP's faster startup. XP uses a technique called pre-fetching to load operating system components at the same time as your hardware devices are being initialised.
XP also takes note of which code and data is normally loaded during startup. It then rearranges the files on the hard disk so these startup files are quickly accessible.
Hibernate and Standby have been speeded up as well, which is particularly good news for notebook users.
Hibernate mode lets you turn your computer off but save the state of your work – open files, folders, programs, et cetera – so that when you turn it back on, your system returns to that same state. XP takes less time to compress all the data in RAM, copy it to hard disk, and then switch off.
In Standby mode, XP turns of the monitor, hard disks and other devices, but maintains open documents and programs in RAM. Under XP, resuming work from Standby mode is appreciably faster.
© 2001, Rose Vines
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