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tried WinXP ??

has anyone tried windows XP ???

just yesterday i installed it , and believe me its damn COOL. :cool:

just select the Silver scheme for the Luna theme and man, what you see is very much comparable to Mac OS X.

not only it feels slick, it runs smooth as hell.

you must XPerience it,

jd

yeah agree, silver rules. I am on xp for about 5 months now, since 2485 and it was pretty good even back then. Although not many changes from rc1 to rc2 :( but it still rocks

P.S. yo, jd, congratulations on becoming our mod :))

P.S. yo, jd, congratulations on becoming our mod :))


thx. :)

its amazing that you are working with XP for 5 months.

i got beta 2 months back. but beta 2 was buggy and it annoyed me, so didnt used it. but the final version is much more stable and no irritating bugs i could find.

jd

Yes, I have to admit, too, silver is the very best color scheme followed by olive. The default, blue, actually has some flaws particularly at the top of the window-closing-minimizing buttons.

Atrus.

Is that all that XP is, Color Schemes?

I would hope that there are some better features then that.

hm..schemes are one thing.

i think look has improved a lot.

one very important feature is that number of users can be logged in simulataneiously. you can switch between users and users see their desktop exactly what it was when they switched. its really cool.

i never logoff from XP, i just do switch user and then i hibernate the machine. that makes things go pretty fast.

apart from that context sensitive task pane is cool, when you select the folder/file it displays corresponding action you can take.

major improvement in hardware support. before final release , getting internal modem to work in XP was difficult. now its breeze.

and yeah you should definately XPereince more speed.

and yeah i am not from microsoft, i am writing what i have XPereinced,

jd

I agree on hardware thing - slef configuration is a sweet thing. It wasnt rare on win98 when it showed me something I dont have (like dvd instead of cdrw), and xp set up drivers for almost all hardware (except one nic) wihtout even asking too many questions. Stability increased big time - I host both http and ftp servers for average of 5 days without rebooting. User separtion is a neat thing also - if these aren't your programs you dont get them started win system load. Complitely customizable (well, probably not that much as *nix I suppose, but still).
Having said that, little problem with xp is that when it crashes and you weren't fast enough to make recovery, you're done. I mean when it crashed it crashes. Recently (two days ago) I had to format 75 gigs because xp wouldn't start, and its not like I dont know what am I doing.

P.S. jdk, I've had 2485 from somewhere mid-may (as I recall) so its not exactly 5 months, but pretty close.

Any of you XP usera have thoughts/comments on what Steve Gibson (http://grc.com/dos/sockettome.htm) is saying about XP and raw sockets? Sounds like XP is great from a user perspective, but very dangerous security-wise.

moral of the story: never use Home Edition :D And I never did anyway, thx for the link though

Cool. Perhaps you could enlighten me, since I haven't bought a Microsoft product in 4 years. Which version of XP do you use, and what makes it better than, say Windows 98, or Windows 2000 Professional? And why is it's security better than Home Edition?

In other words, for my upcoming desktop, I was thinking about Windows 2000 as an alternate boot to Linux, but would XP be simpler, and hopefully--faster, than Win2000?

WinXP could be your next os of choice for desktop for several reaons. Probably the major one is speed, you could check out official bull crap at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/evaluation/whyupgrade/performance.asp but even not knowing the numbers you can feel the speed comparing to loaded win98 (at my other box)
Installing hardware became a dream job, since all you have to do is actually to conenct wires correctly and xp will do the rest for ya.
Security.... well how can you say untill someone will post some exploit? Looks decent at the first glance - devided into users sections (even though sometimes in funny-sad ways). IIS is the same as always (which is sh*ty), but microsoft actually gives out cds now which are supposely the all-new-iis-bug-free (nothing but patched version of older iis' though). Just ordered that cd.
Dont really know the difference between home and professional versions, but I'd suggest you get pro (dont ask why, cuz the only thing I can say is that it sounds cooler :D )
Remote desktop is a neat thing too - take it to college/work and you have your box wherever (assuming fast inet).
100% User-friendly, even my greats could use it.
Stable not much less then *nix - I used to host both http and ftp on my box without rebooting for days and days.

Bottom line: xp is not just a nice-flashy thing from microsoft, it might actually be something usefull some time down the road after all updates and upgrades.

Oh, and yeah, make sure you've got something >600 mhz >64mb

hi rycamor,

how r u doing mate !!

its amazing to know that you havent bought anything for last 4 years, but i find development on linux not cool coz dont have editplus there !!

anyways,
i think XP is definately improvement, its really user friendly.

though we wont be bothering about it ( we are power users !! he he he !! ),
for us, its faster, i should admit its faster even after that slick GUI. though u need good hardware, but once you have it,
you would be cruising along !! hardware support has improved too.

though i didnt know about all that security issues, thx for pointing them out.
keep them aside, XP is worth trying.

jd

They have a nice countdown timer on microsoft's site untill the xp hits the stores (supposely), I wonder what happens when timer gets to 0.....
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/default.asp (left side)

Hey JD, congrats on being mod ;)

It's not that I haven't bought _anything_ in the past 4 years, but I haven't bough any Microsoft products in the past 4 years. It's not that I have a "GNU" ax to grind against M$, but just that with Windows NT 4, and then with Win98, and Office 97, I had all the Windows I needed. My feeling is that most of the things added since Win95/NT are just fluff, but maybe WinXP or Win2000 will change my mind.

I was playing around with Office 2000 awhile ago, and I have to say, I am not impressed. In fact, I will venture to say that most of Microsofts products were as good as they would get back in '97, and since then, they have mainly just added the idiotic stuff, like the "paperclip guy", or the irritating stuff, like Word's autodetection features, which try to read your mind and do stuff for you while you are writing.

So the products I buy for my Windows station tend to be 3rd-party software, like UltraEdit (http://www.ultraedit.com), Dreamweaver or CorelDraw. Honestly, I haven't really felt the need to upgrade Corel or Dreamweaver since '98 either.

The software that I stay current with is the exciting stuff like FreeBSD, Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, all of which is free ;).

Originally posted by rycamor
Hey JD, congrats on being mod ;)
I was playing around with Office 2000 awhile ago, and I have to say, I am not impressed. In fact, I will venture to say that most of Microsofts products were as good as they would get back in '97, and since then, they have mainly just added the idiotic stuff, like the "paperclip guy", or the irritating stuff, like Word's autodetection features, which try to read your mind and do stuff for you while you are writing.
I think I have to disagree with you here, in fact officexp is a pretty decent office program, furthermore, i dont think there are any serious competitors to it on the market.

I haven't played with Office XP, just Office2000, so I can't comment, but an associate of mine who was forced to switch said he can't stand it, precisely because of all the little "help-you-out" features, and radical changes. He actually had to keep Word 97 on his system, because he was using some macros in Word to generate HTML, and Word XP made a mess of it.

I'm sure there are some features available in OfficeXP that really shine. However, most users will only ever use about 5% of the features in OfficeXP, but will be forced to continually wade thorugh all the other prompts, auto-completing, wizards, and what-have-you.

Part of my complaint with Microsoft's software is just that they don't know when to leave well enough alone. For example, my favorite version of Word was the one that came with Office 4.5. (That's right!). It had everything I could ever imagine wanting for a word processor. It had about 250 different commands and features built into the interface. I became an expert at using it. I ignored Office 95 when it came out, but when Office 97 came out, I felt I had to upgrade, simply because I was on a 32-bit platform (NT) and so I figured the software better be 32-bit also. I was hoping that the interface would be largely the same, only faster, with bug fixes, and a few more "enterprise-level" features. Instead what I found was a completely different interface, with all of my previous shortcuts gone. Rather than being faster, Word was now noticeably slower. It now had over 1000 commands/features. But instead of extending my power, the software started doing all these little things that left me feeling powerless. I would start to type a bulletted list, and suddenly the layout would change, because Word had decided that I was typing a bulletted list. If I wanted to go back and change something on the list, all these weird things would happen. Often I would just scrap that section of the document and start over, rather than frustrate myself. Rather than letting me decide when I wanted to use the features, now it was deciding. Maybe I'm a 35-year-old curmudgeon, but I really thought the point of software was to empower the user, rather than treat the user like a child.

Microsoft's two best pieces of software are Excel and SQL Server. That's because they realized that after a certain time, the only use for continued development is to fix bugs, increase performance, and refine the already existing features, rather than change everything. I wish they would maintain that approach to their other software.

Maybe I am off-base here... Tell me, what is it about Office XP that will make it so much better than Office 97, or all the other office suites out there?

Well, when man is right, he's right.
I guess it depends on the person, but even though I dont use even those 5% of office, its nice to know that the rest 95% are there, and I can get them at any time I wish. But, everyone has his own scale of measuring how usefull the product is, so I wont argue with you on advantages/disadvantages of ms software (though I agree on wizards part). Plus my mama always said not to talk back to those who're older than me :D
Seriously, I think that that majority of offices use 'ms office' for info proccessing should give 'ms office' few extra points (unless all of them are idiots, which I think isn't true), or may be I am just making a big deal of 'office' just to get extra clients for ms (may be they will give me some commitions :rolleyes: )
I am not a ms fan, but office if probably one of those few good things they've made (is windows in that list? need double check...)

P.S.curmudgeon uhhhh..that gotta hurt..... cant talk like that about yourself - "Its bad carma, doood" (some movie)

Hey, I wasn't taking the curmudgeon part seriously until you said that. Now I'm going to have a mid-life crisis, throw out all my U2 music, give up on computers, and open a natural foods store.

OK, enough whining... ;)

I don't understand why everyone just loves windows xp... the fact is that its no good at all... people just hear the perks that it comes with and they just go nuts.. let me give you the straight facts.... most games don't work with it... so you wan't to try the "reverse compatiblity" crap ? haha well no luck there... that works with like 1 application out of 1000...Yes, I am running the final version of windows xp professional, yes I do have more than enough ram and speed.. but the fact is that my computer had better performance with windows 2000... it managed the handle more applications, more background services, and didn't crash... yes... it didn't crash... it might have failed once in a few months but thats it...
Now windows xp, just when the resources start to rise all the programs fail to respond and some of them lock and don't let me end the task... hows that better than win2k ?!?!?!
I just loved the Ctrl+Alt+Del for Win2k... it was the smartest thing M$ had ever done.. but windowsxp even removed that!!! now it just goes to the Task manager ?
The odd thing is that, its build on NT technology! This just gives NT a bad name, NT "used" to be a stable OS.
So then I decided to minimize the gui usage and make it look like win2k... then when i compared them end-to-end here's what i came up with... win2k could still support more, it was more stable, the gui for win2k ended up looking better....
What do I care if this os gives me remote assistance... its not like i'll ever let anyone access my computer.... if i need to do that on win2k i'll just use netmeeting which is built-in.

In conclusion, If you want to waste your money and get a better gui, then get XP, otherwise stick with 2k until MS .NET 1.0 comes out...And also, The Silver GUI is the best :)

>>most games don't work with it...
every game released later then mid-this year works just fine, and it was meant to work with xp. Games before that - who cares about them? Major games work fine, minor ones dont need to be even mentioned.
>>so you wan't to try the "reverse compatiblity" crap ? haha well no luck there...
may be not for you, but it does work in most cases
>>that works with like 1 application out of 100
wrong
>>I just loved the Ctrl+Alt+Del for Win2k... it was the smartest thing M$ had ever done..
>>but windowsxp even removed that!!!
errr! try again! c-a-d is still there and does it job just fine, in fact in my opinion it is even better then that of win2k
>>What do I care if this os gives me remote assistance
if you dont then... well... lets put it that way: Then you dont know what you are missing. I am away from my box most of the time and I use simple remote desktop everywehre I need access my info (assuming fast inet access and pc), and that helps me in many many cases when I forget something.
>>In conclusion, If you want to waste your money and get a better gui,
>>then get XP, otherwise stick with 2k
that is your conlusion
>>let me give you the straight facts
and those are your facts, which I disagree with.
>>The Silver GUI is the best
you were just saying how bad xp is, and now this.... make up your mind, will ya?










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