Yes, it's true. After my little rant about how I wouldn't be upgrading to WinXP for some time yet, I finally caved. My Win2K install was starting to act up, and XP RC2 was up on MSDN, so I did the only thing a big fat liar such as myself could do and downloaded it. My main gripe with it before was the issues with sharing "protected" folders, and since this was on my main machine, I don't need to access these from my other machines. Anyway, after much tweaking, crashing and swearing, I got everything to work except for Gamespy Arcade, which absolutely refuses to co-operate. After all this, I'll probably stick with XP when the official release happens, but I still don't see any advantages whatsoever over Win2K except a few graphical tweaks.

Vaguely on the same topic, I was reading an forum about XP today (may have been on slashdot, if not something of the same vein). People were complaining about the system requirements of XP, and how it would rule many newbies out, as their hardware wasn't up to spec. This reminded me of something I was reading within the last few days, I have no recollection of where (maybe here?), but the general gist of the article was that Microsoft's OSs were being held back by the fact that they were always trying to cater to older hardware, to get more people to upgrade. Because Apple has control of the hardware used to run their OSs as well as the OS themselves, it places them in the position of being able to really get the most out of new technologies, by making their new software, which is bundled with the hardware to take full advantage of this. Anyway, I'm rambling now.

AJ