WindowsXP

Thanks for the info AJ... you reinforce my intention to stay with Win2k

Yeah, never mind that just about everything in his entire message was false.

Actually that is true to my experience with WinXP, I have absolutely no reason to lie.

AJ, nay chance you could come and 'MAKE' Tony Hawks work on Win 2K for me coz buggered if I can get it going..... And I decided against a dual boot Only game I really enjoy playing as well.

TarKus, AJC is not very far off, the mark.
I have run the Beta's myself, and have come accross, some of those issues. Included, is the MS Firewall Crap, and about 10 Services that are not needed, by the average User, nomatter what MS says. The MS Messanger, prob is exactly as he says. Delete the Reg Entry and it comes, back on reboot. You can Delete the Entry and then get rid of the progeam folder. MS only offers the option od Uninstalling the MSN, front end. They also shove Wizards @ ya for just about everything. They have incorporated, the Network crawler technology from WInMe, as well as the Restore, feature. They also have included Remote Assistance, and Remote Desktop Features. Like this is really needed in the home environment.
MS has added Several Default Log-In accounts, as users. They also Sneak Digital Signing Media Technology in there, for all, you digital Music Fans, as well as Digital Music Device detection.
And here is my pet peeve, I installed the Beta, to use WMedia, Moviemaker, with my Digital Camcorder. It's a Sony. As soon as I set what device type it was and captured, the Movie, I opened Outlook, and Low and Behold I had a SPAM, from SONY, about their Newest and latest Cam devices and Add-on stuff. Coincidence? You tell me, awefully funny to get something from sony after hooking up, my Cam, 5 minutes later.

The issue here is that AJ is running into NT security which is more robust than WinME.

In WinME, I share a folder and everyone can see it by default. In Windows NT, you have to give users accounts on your machine first and then give them (unless they're admins) explicit permission to see it.

I didn't say you were lying, AJCrawley. I'm sure you believed what you wrote.

You said it's basically ME on an NTFS drive. Nothing could be further from the truth. The 9x kernal was dropped. It has almost nothing to do with ME, though a few of the features were carried over. If anything, it's W2K with prettier clothing, though it's more than that, too.

You said it's horribly restricted. Not so at all, if you understand what you're doing. And Pro is designed for the security conscious. The Home Edition will be much simpler for the average user (though less secure, also).

Regarding the use of wizards, yeah, it defaults to wizards, but most can be bypassed.

You said you need to run regedit to keep MS Instant Messenger from running. Any decent startup manager such as Startup Cop or the included msconfig would do the same thing. And that should be one of the first programs anyone runs when installing a new computer and/or OS.

The rest of the stuff is opinion and stuff specific to your system, and I have no problem with any of that. However, I'd like to point out that the general attitude in the beta groups is VERY positive.

Hey Tarkus - just to clear the matters up:

When I said "It's basically WinME on an NTFS drive", I was speaking figuratively - insofar as it felt a lot more like WinME than 2K from a user perspective, in that it's more of a home OS than a production one.

I have a thorough understanding of NT security, as I administered several networks, from NT 3.51 to 2000 in my network admin days. I had no trouble setting that it, but (in build 2505 anyway), the OS makes it impossible to share certain folders, it's not an account issue, it's a matter of the way the OS is built, if anyone running XP Pro wants to check the network sharing help file it will tell you as much.

The only game I've ever had a problem running on 2k is Dungeon Keeper 2, and a patch was released for that, a lot of the game trouble on 2k is a result of poor driver support from manufacturers, but if you have a properly supported graphics card, you shouldn't have much trouble.

As for the feedback on beta groups being very positive, I wouldn't know about that, and to people still using 9x/ME I'm sure it would seem great, but from my experience with it, I simply did not like many aspects of it. I heard nothing but negative feedback for it from people I talk to online before I installed it, but I was prepared to give it a chance. To be honest, I probably would have stuck with it if it wasn't for the drive sharing issue.

I hope this resolves any misunderstanding on the original post. It's not that I don't know how to use the OS, it's simply that it offered me no positives over 2k, and just enough negatives that I have no interest in installing it unless it in time offers me features that 2k can't.

Cheers,

AJ

I was using W2K also, and after a few days with WXP, I liked it so much, I went ahead and removed the dual-boot and went strictly WXP. I don't miss W2K at all, even though I did like it.

I'm not sure what you're talking about with regard to sharing certain folders. What folders are you trying to share? System folders?

BTW, this page will tell you how to get rid of MS Instant Messenger:

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_tips_rc1.asp

So Targus, tell us what you like about it.

I really hate the way Microsoft, with every new version of Office or Windoze, always seems to try to have things done automatically or through a wizard. It erks me. I hate wizards, and I like to have control.
Or that &*%&*$? HTML page in the Program Files or Windows folder that hides the content until you tell it to show it. In Win 2000 it's the same for "My Network Places"... Grrrr!
Let me do what I want! Argh!

Hey Tarkus, the folders I'm referring to are known as "protected folders" in XP. They include anything under the "Documents and Settings" tree, "Program Files", and "Windows". I know that the point of making these folders unsharable is:

a) So people don't screw with system files over the network.

So people can't go through your private documents.

However, I work over 3 machines, and while I suppose I could've easily made another folder for "My Documents", it's just what I'm used to using, and didn't end up bothering. It's not that it's such a bad idea, but there *should* be a way around it. Also, I just used TweakShell to stop IM loading at startup, but again, it's a case of MS making it diffucult for less knowledgable users to remove things that they neither want nor need.

At the end of the day, it's all a matter of opinion, XP didn't offer me anything over 2000, and had a few disadvantages in my opinion, I'm sure a lot of other people will like it, and a lot won't. From my perspective, it was a logical evolution of WinME, not of 2000. The point of my original post was to give people that don't have access to betas and bosses that buy them MSDN subscriptions/software a bit of insight into the matter before they go and splash $700 on a copy, or whatever ludicrous price tag MS decide to slap on it.

Right, heres my two cents

Im on XP RC1 as I type this. Firstly, XP RC1 hasnt been around for a couple of weeks

Secondly, XP is VERY restrictive when you first install, however, with a few minutes fiddling you can regain full control. The first step you should try is right mouse click on the desktop, choose properties, and go to the desktop tab. Once there, go to customize desktop. On the general tab you can then choose to show the various icons on the desktop, enable My Computer.

You might find that there is no quick launch, right mouse click the taskbar and go to the toolbars menu, and select quick lauch, voila!

Now, for the control panel - its a new style which can be confusing for people, to fix that, choose Appearance and Themes and then go to Folder Options. In the general tab, set the first option to "Use Windows Classic Folders". Ahh, thats better, more familiar . You will now see things such as the administrative tools which you can have a fiddle with.

You also might want to look at the "User Accounts" option in the control panel.

Now, as for the services that you don't need, thats easily solved. Go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services. From there you can disable any services you like, such as the messenger service.

If you use the new search option you'll probably get annoyed with it in about 1 second. To change this, load the search. Choose "change preferences". Then go to "change files and folders search behaviour", and switch to advanced. Tada, the good old easy to use search.

In my experience it pays to poke around and not to give up! The only reason I still dual boot is that my printer does not have any NT drivers (damn Lexmark!). I have found XP to be more stable, faster, easier to use, and much more user friendly.

Hope you found this informative and useful, I try to stay focused and not let flaming and emotions get in the way

berzerka

Hey Berzerka, you're right, it does pay to take the time to look around, but I did exactly that, and the issue is that there's just things (such as sharing protected folders) that are hard coded into XP, and I don't like it one bit, no sir. And just FYI, XP RC1 has been available on MSDN since mid-June when I originally got my copy.

when I typed that message it was 2am, I now recall getting my CD earlyish June. I stand corrected

berzerka

I know but hey ENOUGH WITH THE XP THEMES. I'm tired of theme. Stop Please.

lol @ spaceghost

i agree, stop with the XP themes, the best replica has already been made

I have just got rid of my win2k and switch exclusively to XP. I couldn’t find any reason not to use it. and It allows me to use programs, mostly games, that I couldn’t run in win2K. I was quite surpassed how easy it is to get rid of some of the new, more restrictive, features. Over all I am quite happy with XP.

AJCrowley: Gotcha, WRT the protected folders.

Paxx: I'm not a big fan of wizards, either, but as I said earlier, most can be bypassed.

Regarding the thing about not being able to see the content in the Windows folder, it only gives you the warning once for each protected folder. I think that's perfectly reasonable.

A few of the reasons why I love WXP (just off the top of my head):

The new Start menu. Not everyone likes it, but I think it's great. It made me stop using DX's Start menu. I love the two pane approach, and I love how it keeps my most used programs on top, while highlighting newly installed files.

System Restore. Has already saved my butt a couple times. You can buy third party programs that do this, but now you don't have to.

Built-in CD burning. I still use ECDC or Nero for complex jobs, but the built-in burning is great for simple drag and drop jobs.

Thumbnails for pics *and* video files. Yes, W2K has limited thumbnail support, but not like this. It even gives you thumbnails on folders, so you can see up to four files in the contents without ever opening up the folder.

Stability. Yes, W2K is very stable, but I find WXP RC1 even more stable. Of course, a lot of that depends on what drivers you need. My NIC driver sucked under W2K, but works great under WXP.

Easy user switching. Actually encourages you to maintain a separate Administrator account, since it's so easy to switch back and forth.

32-bit icons. Not much here yet, but give it time.

Taskbar skinning. Can't wait for WB to support this. It looks great in the Luna themes.

Real-time Help system. Very, very cool and informative. Much, much better than W2K's built-in Help system.

WMP8. Finally, MS got it right. Even the big window is skinned, and it has a lot of great new features, including a very cool full screen mode, in which (optionally) the controls fade in and fade out as you need them. And skins can have functionality instead of just looking pretty. For example, one has radio presets.

Explorer. A few neat little additions, like a new Details pane. It sorts numerically named files logically now, so that file2.ext is displayed before file10.ext. Using the back button will now show a highlighted file instead of always taking you to the top of the list.

I'm sure there's a lot more, but like I said, that's just off the top of my head. I'm always discovering little things that I like, that aren't exactly earth shattering features by themselves, but they all add up.

Of course, not everything is great (WPA comes to mind), but there's very little about it that I find negative. YMMV.

WPA will be gone in RC2.... ms got into trouble about it

What's WPA?

the activation feature which requires you to activate your copy of windows with ms

Is it official that it will be gone in RC2 or just roomer?

Tarkus, I agree with you. I like XP, even though there is some more customization and optimization work to do than with Win2k. After all, an hour or so of tweaking isn't a big deal.

I hadn't yet noticed the new files sorting. Nice feature!

Speaking of 32-bits icons, I uploaded a demo screenshot here :

http://www.deviantart.com/browse/?section=windows&start=20&limit=5

The next version of Peter Stuer's IconShop will support conversion from MacOS X to XP icons, keeping the alpha-blending effect. Peter has still some work to do beofre releasing it, but the conversion feature is already working great, as you can see from my ss

BTW, I uploaded it on WC too, but it seems to have been rejected. Or is the moderation thing taking more than 36h? Just asking, not complaining...

No no no, it seems you misunderstand, I'm used to having the warning about viewing system folders in 2k, this is not the problem I am discussing with XP (though it would be nice to get rid of it). The problem is that no matter how you set up your network file shares, you cannot access these folders. When you try and get into one of them from the remote machine, XP will simply return an access denied error, whether you navigate there from the root, or explicitly share that folder. The MS help file says there is no way around it, and endless asking for help on the XP IRC channels and news groups yielded no help. This is just the way it is in XP, if there is a way around it, nobody's found it yet, and if they have, they've not spoken to me (damn them). I probably will switch to XP eventually, but certainly not while it's still in release candidate stage, and not until I am convinced that there is any benefit to me in doing so.

I still use Windows95 and I have had no problems almost ever! BWAHAHA.hah. cough cough.. almost choked there