So far it's pretty crazy, but I'm not sure whether it's crazy in a good or a bad way yet. I'm not so sure about these giant goofy icons either. It all seems very suspicious...

That's crazy talk, man! Crazy talk!

XP Home or Professional?

Professional. My review in three words: So. Many. Wizards.

Linux: The Ultimate Service Pack for Windows.

My Linux review in three words: Not. Enough. Wizards.

Worst. Wizard. Ever.

I have XP Professional installed on a test machine here, and I am aghast at the number of built-in ways they have to send to to MSN or other Microsoft sites and services. And, of course, to use most of them you need a Passport, so they can keep track of you for the rest of your life.

Windows XP actually downloads a tiny gnome that takes up residence in your PC. When you're asleep it comes out and roots through your fridge and steals your socks.

There isn't a patch, per se. But if you leave a bunch of Oreos out on your counter it'll probably gorge itself and then it'll be too slow to run away when you open up the case and whack it with a hammer.

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I have XP Professional installed on a test machine here, and I am aghast at the number of built-in ways they have to send to to MSN or other Microsoft sites and services. And, of course, to use most of them you need a Passport, so they can keep track of you for the rest of your life.

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If it's power toys you're after, Macintosh already has them.

Well, I'll stick with a version of Windows that lets you reboot into native DOS, thanks. Windows98SE for me. Windows XP is just too packed with stupid, unneeded "features" for me. They put EVERYTHING on the start menu, put in some weird graphic interfaces, and the list goes on. It takes up gigs just to let you restore your computer... Thanks, but I'll stick with and OS that doesn't need all that. :) To me, XP is for people who don't know the meaning of "backup". Same with ME. It also tries to make up for it's inadequacies by looking cartoonish. I like my square gray boxes.

I'd just rather go with Win2K or Linux when it comes right down to it, but Win98SE hasn't given me too many problems, other than the fact that my entire computer is integrated components. Ugh.

I reformatted my hard drive. Then I installed W98. Then I installed XP. Then I uninstalled it. Then reinstalled W98, and then XP. Then I reformatted the hard drive and installed 98. Then upgraded to 2000. Then I beat my head against the wall.

The whole reason for uninstalling XP was some wacky incompatibility with my sound card. Which oddly enough ended up happening with 2000, too. I finally ditched it and used the onboard sound on the motherboard which worked. So I prob could have stuck with XP if I hadn't been such a tool.

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...if I hadn't been such a tool.

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Windows XP is just too packed with stupid, unneeded "features" for me.

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I'd just rather go with Win2K or Linux when it comes right down to it...

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XP crashed twice when I was playing with it in the store. Windows 98SE has only crashed on me when I have a lot of programs running at once...

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XP crashed twice when I was playing with it in the store.

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40899

I gave in and upgraded from Windows 2000 Professional to Windows XP.

Sure is pretty.

I have to say it was a pretty smooth upgrade. My only problem is that 3D games stopped working with my 3DFX card. Not surprising since they went out of business and I'm stuck with Microsoft drivers under XP. Rolling back to the 2000 drivers only made things worse. In the end it gave me an excuse to replace the Voodoo card with a 64mb Radeon card.

Other than that... pretty much the same as Windows 2000... but pretty. I'm using the silver color scheme and it makes everything look all MacOS X-ish. With a little work I was able to remove "features" like MSN Messenger.

Only one strange thing -- since the only user on my system is Administrator surprised to see an automatically created Backup account as the defaul logon ID. Administrator wouldn't even come up in the quick logon list. I set the logon to the old style and was able to type in the name. Strange.

Reason No. 14214 that I could be a geek :

I was using XP when it was "Whistler".

I've used XP, it's not anything more than ME (or NT, or 2000, or 98), except it has more special effects and crap you'll never need most likely. In other words: XP is not worth the hundreds you'll pay for it.

Actually: I can think of one good reason for XP: It helps you out if you always do the exact same thing everytime you go on the computer. (Well, not the exact same mouse movements per se, but use the same programs, go to the same sites, et al.) There it can help you. If you have any sort of life, or you want to upgrade your computer ever, don't XP.

My Acore: Peepee on XP.

Hey, XP has compatibility mode... plus it's easier to use the different aplications from microsoft together with their new software(forget what it's called). It's easier to log on and off because your programs will keep runing, which is good for a family. I know because I attended a seminar about the new Microsoft stuff(2 actualy).

The problem with XP is that a lot of the bundled drivers are for stuff that's fresh off of the Silicon Valley and Tokyo production design shelf. It's made a lot of older hardware obsolete. In case you haven't noticed, MS keeps flogging a fatter layer cake of their shitty O/S every 2 years in order to make you upgrade, and the hardware support is arse.

The only reason I run Win on my rigs is that I use them professionally and all of my audio software is WIN32. DeMuDi still hasn't gotten all of their cookies in one box to the point where Debian Linux is a viable MMX O/S. I'm not binning $4,000.00 worth of audio apps to run Linux on my DAW rigs.

I just took Me off of my Celery 600 because it was fragged to shit. I booted in Win98 and even though I have 95, 98, 98SE and Me. I'm going with this 98 build because it's fuckoff roubust and doesn't crash hardly at all. I'll run XP about an hour and a half after hell freezes over. XP is the first 'gloves off' go at total market dominance from MS; -O/S, ISP, hardware drivers, security that dis-allows more than one installation- and Bill Gates can suck a wet fart out of my arse with it.

It's already been backwards engineered and is out on P2P clients and a few Warez sites complete with serial cracks, but I don't want it.

Linux made but one single, huge, stupid, unforgiveable mistake: They didn't charge money. People would have gladly paid $20.00 a disc for Linux if they would have used the money to develop apps and MMX codecs for it's root based O/S. They wanted to be the guys in the white hats, and now they're the guys in the basement.

And that's a shame.

You're a lucky guy if you've had stability with a Win 9x code base -- it never gave me anything but trouble. It's still a pretty face on top of DOS.

With Windows 2000, they finally grew NT to the point where I could run my office apps and games on something more robust. I have to work really hard to crash this thing.

As for Linux... well, there are a lot of factors. You can pay $30 for Red Hat, get yourself a copy of StarOffice and be pretty productive. Unfortunately, for the typical end-user there are still too many technical barriers. Red Hat has done a great job of streamlining the installation process, but KDE and Gnome just aren't polished enough for an end-user OS. All of the stuff that Windows does pretty simply (like add printers or change display resolution) is a mish-mosh of difficult to find features and inconsistent interfaces.

Don't get me wrong... I loathe Microsoft. When IBM threw it's support behind Linux I hoped they'd pull the old OS/2 development team and write a nice, solid interface. Instead, they've concentrated on the server side.

MacOSX is an example of what a great Linux interface could have been. It runs on a variation of BSD. Now if they could make that work on the x86 version of BSD... wow, they would have something!

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It's still a pretty face on top of DOS.

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I have just had a fun evening/night, and it doesn't seem to be over yet.

I bought a new PC back in October, an Athlon 1.3GHz budget system. I have been having problems from day one, thanks largely to the fact that instead of installing Win98SE, they stuck it on with a disc image. The shit I found rummaging around in the resgistry was absolutely amazing - why don't these places make sure they have a nice clean image before they go throwing it onto people's PCs? Anyway, I finally got fed up with the myriad problems it caused and did a reinstall - Win2KPro. That's when the problems started...

The Win installation was no problem, but then... the first problem was the video card (nVidia GeForce2 MX 64MB). Basically, it wasn't there. I dug around the discs I had been provided with and found a driver. It was the wrong driver. After much rummaging, I found the right one. Then it was time to deal with the other problems. Where was my internal modem? It wasn't auto-detecting, so didn't seem to be Plug and Pray. None of the provided drivers worked. After much swearing, I shut down and pulled the box open. You know hardware is somewhat dodgy when the company that makes it is too ashamed to put their name on it. I ended up doing a Google search for the FCC-ID, and followed a trail of clues from there.

The next bit is the best... in opening the case, I decided to check the "3D PCI sound card" my PC came with. Oh, did I say card? I meant built-in sound on the motherboard. As such, the sound drivers were on the motherboard's driver disc. of course, i should have realised. Since the sales assistant told me it had a sound card in it, they will be getting an unfriendly phone call tomorrow.

Well, after being shown all the good things in XP by the nice guy at the store who would make the same off XP or 98SE (it's an independant store, no sponsorship, they prefer AMD CPUs), I'm convinced it doesn't really suck. It's kinda neat, but has it's problems. You have to turn off the XP spyware, and the compatability modes don't always work. Also, XP runs on a Win2K base, as was stated here already, which means you have to get Win2K drivers for everything. The Windows messenger that comes with WinXP is essentially MSN Messenger. Can't get MSN Messenger for XP, you have to use WinMessenger. The difference between XP and ME is that XP uses a save feature that isn't bloated and useless, and it's based on Win2K instead of Windows 95 (which ME was based on). I think I'll dual-boot with Linux and XP when I get a new computer.

Al Qaeda is runnning your XP box!

Installing trojans, bugs and trapdoors in Microsoft code -- isn't that getting into coals-to-Newcastle territory?

The saddest part of this story is that should it turn out to be true, nobody will be able to differentiate the bug riddled Al Qaeda-written code from bog stock MicroSoft programming.

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The Windows messenger that comes with WinXP is essentially MSN Messenger. Can't get MSN Messenger for XP, you have to use WinMessenger.

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