(I'm not sure what Emily Post would say about dribbling the blood from a beaten, (dying?) topic across multiple threads and fora, but I figured best to get OT out of General and put it in the nice, new OT Forum where it can be more systematically ignored by those so inclined! So....)

Yes, this, The MOTHER of All Windows XP Threads, would like to categorically say that it's predecessor, the so-called ONE, TRUE Off-Topic XP Thread! is a poseur, a weakling, a twisted sorry thread barely worthy of your consideration (Um, you may have already concluded as much...) Why, it's not even in the right place!

Anyhow, I just wanted to respond to a few posts in predecessor threads. (I'll e-mail 'em a note in the event they care...) If folks have other observations related to their experience with XP, I guess this would also make an OT place to put them.

Over here BarryB wrote (among other things):

Recently at my company, the site manager has started using the phrase "technology bullshit" to describe many IT projects. At first I and many others thought he "just didn't get it" and must be a moron. Now I'm coming to realize he's right to a large extent. In IT we often spend large sums of money upgrading and changing systems and technologies. The cost to the company to make these changes is often not trival, yet it's nearly impossible to accuratly assess the payout after we do the project.

This is in complete contrast to other projects in the company. Other, non-IT, projects absolutely have to justify a payout with-in a fairly short timespan or the project doesn't happen. Why should IT be any different?

One project that often doesn't need to happen is upgrading Windows and Office every year or two. In many cases we are happy with how these work and see no need to change anything. (..........)

I want to agree with your post in general, but I want to say that I really think I'd like your site manager! I think a lot of companies have gotten swept away with the some technologies (IT being the biggest example) without accurately counting the costs or measuring the business outcomes. This seems to have gotten briefly worse during the recent techno-bubble, and it looks like now we get to deal with that champagne hangover.


Yet, I saw Bill Gates on Charle Rose two nights ago claiming that Windows XP will introduce new improvements in productivity which will in turn help revive the economy! Is he really that arogant, or does he just think we're all idiots? It was really hard to tell.

I saw some of that and the "most important product ..." stuff, too. I don't really have a way to tell, but it does not seem inconceivable that the answer to your question could be "both".

Over here Tim wrote:

Personally, I feel that XP is hella better than 2k. I know a few people who have had problems with XP, but I've had very few.

Everyone I know who is running it or has run it tells me they think it is a functional improvement, although some of them haven't run it for that long.

I was really struck by this part of a previously-cited InfoWorld article: "HOPELESS OPTIMISM must be a fundamental part of human nature, because we want to believe that new operating systems truly represent an improvement on their predecessors." This really resonates with me. In the cases of NT3.51, NT4, and Windows 2000, I was really happy to be installing a product that eased some prior pain and which I believed were substantial improvements. And they really were improvements, especially 2000, but in each case the absolute benefit of the upgrade was shown to be less than I originally thought as installations started to degrade and serious care and feeding became an issue (and we're talking on HCL-compliant hardware with mainstream apps). Indeed, the Infoworld benchmarks show 2000 outperforming XP in their scenarios; that kind of report just adds to any caution I have.

The boot-up time is amazing. It was like 5 mins with Win2k, but like 36secs with XP. I really like that. The interface is snappier. I don't have to wait for the menus or anything to pop up any more.

For folks who had to run NT on a laptop, boot time (coupled with no real power management), was one of the killers. Win2K made that a lot better, but this sounds amazingly better. I'm assuming these two times are on the same machine. What kind of specs? For grins I timed the bootup on this 500MHz Dell laptop. I got 1:50 from power-on to Win2K logon prompt, and 2:20 total to the point that I could could actually get the Start menu to respond. That included a couple of boot manager menus and my login, but doubt they added more than 8-10 seconds. Where were you at 36 seconds? Logon prompt, or - gasp - desktop?? Relatively few apps have insinuated themselves into this laptop's startup folder and registry, so it's probably a near-best case for this hardware.

OfficeXP works very nicely with it.

It had better!!

Explorer.exe seems to have a memory leak or something.

The more things change...

What I love is people who make claims and rant without any personal experience with a product, just what some writer has to say.

Hmmm. Having not yet worked with XP, and having quoted a writer, it looks like I fall into this category and that, and that....you LOVE me???

As far as I can tell, most journalists (of the big media companies) have no clue about what they write. They are looking for a way to sell articles, page hits, subscriptions. A way of doing this is to bash things that are popular to bash.

I would agree that there can be a sensationalist, attentionseeking tendency in various media and that contributors improve their chances of continued employment if they help sell magazines, newspaper, et cetera. Sometimes this may be manifested in "bashing", but conversely can be manifested in some of the popular computing press by near-hucksterism -- "Upgrade to Windows 95 and meet the woman of your dreams!!" Thankfully they occasionally publish our letters to the editor debunking them when they stray, but perhaps not often enough. Retractions and corrections go on page 143.

I do not agree with the generalization that most of them don't know what they are talking about. A decent number of them, while very fallible, are pretty smart and, unlike we mere mortals, they often get paid to spend more serious amounts of time getting familiar with products. There are several I value for their aptitude and an ability to (succintly!) put things into words much better than I ever could.

I don't work for Microsoft, and pretty much hate most of their stuff (yeah, WinME was miserable, etc, etc). However, I do like XP and the improvement it is over their past OSes. Just don't bash something you haven't used personally.

I can believe that if I was running XP on this laptop right now, I might easily like it more than this Win2K install (that is starting to show its age) or even more than a brand-new Win2K install. I don't run multimedia stuff on this laptop, nor do I hook up digital cameras to it (or some other new things that XP does) so the immediate benefits might be fewer and less evident. As it is, I don't think anybody's going to pay money to upgrade this laptop to XP as there's no business case. At home, on my desktop/game/multimedia machine, the decision criteria are different, but, on balance, for some reasons that I may have beaten to death, I've decided that I'm not going to upgrade. Where several other folks have also said they couldn't give a hoot about issues like spam (and the seemingly related XP licensing clauses), that single issue, combined with my accumulated experience of MSFT, could be enough of a showstopper all by itself!

In making that kind of decision, I'm not sure if I falling into the category of "bashing something I haven't used personally". If I'm bashing or being unfairly critical, I guess I should get told off or something. As far as an absolute requirement for using something personally, I don't agree. I have had occasion to make use of Demerol and morphine (and they were both great!), but have decided never to use heroin. I have had a sewing machine fall on my head (I am not kidding) and have been run over by a speeding bicycle, but have decided that I never want to try "A Poke In The Eye With A Sharp Stick" (TM). Don't these decisions sound reasonable? And, please, I'm not comparing XP to a sharp stick or illegal narcotics, but I hope instead that I'm just making a decent point.

Again, I'll be interested to see how the latest Windows saga unfolds, so if anybody has any new tidbits, test results, personal; experiences, corrections, whatever....well, we got this new Off-Topic Forum thing here...