Ronn Blankenship <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>At 06:47 PM 7/13/01, Andy wrote:
>>On 13 Jul 2001, at 16:32, Joshua Bell wrote:
>>
>> > >Nope. No, no, I won't pirate anything..it's just that XP has
>> > >NOTHING to offer me (and neither did ME) over 98SE, to warent
>> > >the price of the upgrade!
>> >
>> > I gotta say <snip>
>>
>>XP will give me precisely WHAT tho, to compensate for large driver
>>DL's on a modem and LOTS of greif getting everything (and I have
>>LOTS attached to this PC..) talking again... (probly a weeks work,
>>no kidding..)
>
>
>I haven't even gotten everything working since changing from 95 to 98.
NOTE: Comments below are my personal experience. I'm "divulging" all of this
since that's the point of the EF&F program - I could install XP RC1 on the
machine of anyone here and let you try it out. That's what y'all get for not
living in Seattle. :) (Except for those who do - let me know if you want to
give it a whirl.)
The upgrade took all of an hour of prep work (I only had a 2GB partition for
C: and it was mostly full; XP Home wanted 900MB for the upgrade process),
and an hour running by itself with no problems. I spent about two hours
doing cleanup afterwards that I could have done before - deleting old apps I
never use, tidying up my Start menu, and all those usual bits of life.
The OS is humming along just fine, and it's nice to have NT under it. The
login screen for the shared computer is nice - single click on an icon for
each user - which will make my father-in-law happy when he comes to visit.
The OS visuals are all updated and soothing without being a jarring
departure from what came before.
Oddly, it boots *faster* now than it did Win98, even though I only have
128MB RAM. My video and assorted other drivers are working fine, and
required no effort on my part - but then, I've always been unusually lucky
with upgrades relative to everyone else. One nice thing was being able to
delete/uninstall manufacturer supplied drivers for certain things (e.g. Zip
Drive) in favor of the XP ones.
A few complaints:
- Still no "I'd like to repartition my drives without losing the data"
support in the OS, even after converting almost everything to NTFS. Bleah.
Oh well, gotta keep Partition Magic in business. :)
- I did an "upgrade" rather than a "reinstall", so the NT Kernel/XP Home is
sitting happily in C:\Win98. Ugh, I hate that.
- XP, by default, ships with a very clean desktop and Start menu. Basically,
the desktop is empty except for the Recycle bin. Since I upgraded it kept
all of my existing mess. I might have preferred that it offer to clean
everything up and let me "unpack" the mess just like moving into a new home.
It does have some "transfer settings" tools but I'm not sure what those do.
- Since I picked XP Home instead of Professional, I don't get any inter-user
security, which is strange for NT but on par with Win9x. I was able to make
the other user accounts non-Admin so they - in theory - can't mess things
up. On the flip side, nothing prevents them from logging in as me. I suppose
I should trust my wife, but...
- Some middle-aged games don't appear to be working: Duke Nukem 3D, and
Quake 1.0. However, "Ducktales: The Quest for Gold", "Brix" and a few other
ancient games work (via the DOS environment emulation of NT), as do my Apple
II emulator and MAME. Score one for emulators!
Joshua
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