Product Reviews

When looking at a new version of Windows and its likely uptake in the marketplace, there are always a number of things to be taken into consideration. First, is it any good? The new features are vast, so detailed coverage of these is given in our feature this month (Windows XP uncovered, on p210 of the December 2001 issue).

Second, is it good value for money? You don't get something for nothing in this world, and the value proposition has to be understood clearly if there's to be a good upgrade experience. You also get upgrades of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player (see below), although these can be downloaded independently of XP.

Third, what are the overheads and other stresses and strains that come from performing the upgrade? After all, only in the home or smallest of business environments are we looking at standalone machines. In a networked environment, upgrading the OS on one system may well impact on other machines. Finally, there's the issue of hardware - do you need more and, if so, what?

To start with, there's no question that this is the best ever version of Windows. It has the power of Windows 2000, the core engine of NT, and the games and multimedia capabilities of Windows 98 SE/ME all wrapped into one product. That said, in the corporate desktop space or wherever else you may be running Windows 2000 Professional, there really isn't a whole heap of things in here to get hugely excited about. You won't be using the vast array of Wizards, your IT department will probably turn off the new user interface (UI) look and feel to keep with the Windows 2000 standard, you don't need the desktop firewall features and so forth.

Notebook users may have more reason than most to appreciate the enhanced features (see 'The mobile verdict', below), but otherwise it's Windows 2000.5 by any other name. For this reason, your IT department might well hold off doing the upgrade, and to be honest it would be difficult to argue with it. With Windows 2000, you've got 95 per cent of the cake already, and the remaining five per cent might go against corporate policy for the time being anyway.

If you're running Windows NT 4 Professional, then moving to XP Professional could reap huge benefits for you, especially if you're a notebook user. You get all the plug-and-play capabilities, the EFS (encrypted file system), the sheer ease of use and so forth. But you'd have got that with Windows 2000 Professional anyway, and most of the really enhanced capabilities (like IntelliMirror and EFS) require Windows 2000 Server on the back-end of your infrastructure. So if you were still on NT 4 Server, and not the Active Directory engine of Windows 2000 Server, there's a limited set of features to get excited about here.

Given that the games market for Windows coalesced around Windows 98 SE, it was necessary to keep a machine running 98 SE just to have some games-based fun. Windows 2000 Professional was beginning to come along in some areas, but graphics drivers were still fairly new and mostly flakey. This has changed with XP - the Home Edition may directly replace the whole 9x/ME lineage, but in fact, even the Professional Edition has all the power you need for an excellent gaming platform.

In the business environment, those people who've been stuck on 98 SE or ME as a business desktop platform are going to leap with joy at the new capabilities of XP Professional. A proper filing system, a proper multitasking operating system and real stability are just some of the tips of the iceberg. In every corporate environment where 98 SE/ME has been replaced with Windows 2000 Professional, there's been a stunned realisation that the new code base is on a different planet to the old 9x world. This will continue, at an even higher plane, with XP Professional.

Visually, Windows XP has had a major facelift and, as with Office XP, Microsoft has made every effort to bring usability features to the forefront. This is first evident with the double-columned Start menu featuring last applications used in the left just like the old Documents menu. The default Desktop is also meant to be completely clear, save for a lone Recycle Bin above the systray. My Computer and Network Places have been moved to the right column of the Start menu. You also have streamlining of the systray (only the most often-used shortcuts are displayed now) and the taskbar where applications are grouped into pop-up menus when the taskbar reaches the systray.

This all certainly saves on space, but it also has the disadvantage of bringing everything two clicks away rather than one, with an added delay for thinking time. It's handy to have everything grouped together at once, but it can also be a pain if you want instant access to everything you've got open. It's certainly useful on lower-resolution screens, such as on some notebooks, to compensate for the smaller taskbar.

Value question

If you're a corporate, you'll be getting upgrades to XP as part of your site licensing. This type of licence scale runs down to a small number of seats now. There's no need to do that upgrade immediately, and I recommend waiting until you have a solid Windows 2000 Server installation in place before rolling out XP Professional. That way you can ensure you have all the necessary back-end server capabilities ready to work. As such, the value question can drop into almost insignificance in this marketplace, depending on the sort of licensing facilities you have in place.

For small-business users, you're going to have to pay for an upgrade. If you're on Windows 2000, then don't rush into it. If you're on Windows 98/ME, get in the car right now and go find your local software emporium. Ridding your network of 9x is incredibly therapeutic and I recommend it to all.

Similarly in the games environment, I recommend you make the leap. Yes, you might find driver problems, especially for advanced graphics cards, and a number of games themselves might have issues. However, two teenage family friends who are gaming nuts have a mixed story to tell on this upgrade. One has had lots of problems, the other has had none. Your mileage might vary, but since gamers tend to have high-end hardware, you really owe it to yourself to get a proper operating system in there. And yes, it's worth the upgrade cost.

Onto the third arena - the implications of doing the upgrade in a corporate space. Well, if you're running 98/ME desktops with a Windows NT 4 server, you might well want to do some planning and checking first. For example, you may be running on the NetBEUI network protocol - XP supports only TCP/IP. Imagine having to replumb the entire network to support one new desktop machine. Also, you may have some vital hardware or software that doesn't work well, if at all, under XP. Again, this would be a real problem in a small-business environment.

I strongly recommend doing one 'sacrificial lamb' installation, just to see what happens. Then test, test and test again before doing anything more radical. Use the Setup Compatibility Wizard to produce a list of likely problem areas to be considered before doing the upgrade. Also, disable or uninstall anything that wasn't really necessary - taking out anti-virus software while doing the OS upgrade is probably a good idea, for example.

Finally, there's the issue of hardware. Hopefully you don't have too many machines that are less than a Pentium II/350 - anything above this will run XP like the wind. Check the amount of RAM in the machine - I view 128Mb as the starting point, with 256Mb to be a comfortable amount for day-to-day users. Going for a gigabyte or more isn't unheard of, and at currently £60 for a 512Mb DIMM it's hard to see how you can spend time making yes/no decisions on RAM. Other than that, it should just work - basically speaking, machines made in the last couple of years should have no significant problems. But do check your BIOS is up-to-date first.

With XP, Microsoft has finally delivered on its promise of One Windows. Let's not get embroiled in the 'so what about Windows CE?' argument, please - the claim only ever related to desktop machines. Since we now have just the one platform, a lot of things should be easier. Driver support should be simplified, Plug and Play is already incomparably better. System stability should be dramatically improved, especially for the

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escapees from the 9x/ME world. In the corporate space, you probably already have 2000 Professional in place, in which case XP Professional is a point release for consideration in the future.

There's a vast, largely untapped amount of power on the Desktop and Windows 9x was never going to be the vehicle to allow this to be used efficiently. But with a distributed Windows 2000/XP network running on both the client side and the server side, it's possible to break out of the 1990s mindset of networking in the business environment and to take real advantage of the power features offered by this operating system. XP is, without doubt, the most competent, stable, feature-laden operating system ever built. It's the easiest to install, the simplest to maintain and has the broadest support for applications. How quickly you want or need to move to it largely depends on where you're starting from. However, the verdict's clear - XP is the platform of choice.

Jon Honeyball

The mobile verdict

Microsoft makes several grand claims when it comes to using Windows XP on a notebook. Expect faster performance, better synchronisation with network-based files, integrated support for 802.11b and even 'network location awareness'. The question is, are the promises worth the hassle of upgrading your fleet of notebooks?

To test enhanced performance, we installed XP Professional on a Celeron/500 notebook with 128Mb of RAM. First impressions were underwhelming, as the machine was slightly more sluggish than before. It was no surprise when the results in our own benchmarks distinctly favoured the original Windows 2000 configuration, with the time taken to complete each benchmark increasing by between ten and 20 per cent. This mirrored our initial experience with Windows 2000, when NT 4 originally outperformed it by the same margin, although component manufacturers tweaked their drivers and this gap soon reversed.

Microsoft also claims quicker access to Standby and Hibernate modes, and this time our tests bore this out. The Windows 2000 notebook that previously took around 15 seconds to standby dropped down to under seven, and it returned to the log on screen within nine seconds. Exactly the same sort of increase occurred with a notebook upgraded from ME.

Another noteworthy change from our Windows ME upgrade was the improvement in stability. After weeks of use and employing lots of apps designed for Windows 98, we've yet to experience a crash.

A Windows 2000 feature Microsoft claims to have improved for XP Professional users is offline folder synchronisation. This sets up a dedicated folder on the network, with files updated each time the notebook is hooked up to it. Wireless networking receives even grander claims, although not all of these were borne out by our experiences (see Windows XP uncovered, Wireless wonders, p218 of the December 2001 issue).

Another improvement for notebook users is the addition of ClearType, a smoothing technology that makes the pixel-perfect, clinically jagged fonts on a TFT look as smooth as they would be on a CRT. We previously had the option to smooth the edges of screen fonts in the Display properties, but ClearType takes this one step further without making your TFT look out of focus or blurry. It has a noticeable effect, but not enough to improve readability on the notebooks we used.

So should you upgrade? If your notebooks are running Windows 2000, then the answer is 'no' - the improvements aren't worth the hassle or the money. If they're running Windows 98 or ME, we recommend running a trial upgrade, perhaps on just one machine, to check for hardware and software conflicts, not to mention perceived speed. Any notebook running Windows 95 or NT 4 almost certainly won't be fast enough. All things considered though, this is the best OS yet for notebooks and, if you're buying new machines, make sure you demand Windows XP.

Tim Danton

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6

Of late, Microsoft has been playing a strange game with Internet Explorer version numbers. We've seen major revisions only getting a point change and cosmetic touch-ups getting a whole new number. The same continues with IE 6 - whereas IE 5.5 was a major advance over IE 5, version 6 is a more subtle affair.

Of course, it may not appear that way to the users - remember, IE 5.5's valuable enhancements were mostly hidden 'under the hood'. Unlike its predecessor, IE 6's visible differences are its clothing rather than the body underneath, at least when running on Windows XP. New colourful toolbar icons abound, designed to look good with the new XP Luna look and feel.

As this is a new release, there have to be one or two fresh features. The most noticeable is the privacy regime. The cookie privacy features are built around the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Platform for P3P (Privacy Preferences). Of course, P3P is also supported by Netscape 6.1, although IE 6 goes a step further by not just offering customisable blocking of cookies but also by reporting what it's doing. A Privacy Violation icon is displayed in the browser status bar whenever this feature kicks in, and double-clicking on it shows which cookies have been blocked. UK users will notice this straight away as their default IE home page, www.msn.co.uk, throws up a number of privacy warnings. In fact, many popular sites try to send third-party cookies, usually as a result of their banner ad serving systems.

The only other new features of note are a media bar, which links to Microsoft's windowsmedia.com site, and the facility to scale large images so that they fit in the browser window. Note this only works if you view the image files directly, not as part of a Web page. IE 6 also supports an improved Print Preview function, which allows frames or full-page printing to be selected via the Print Preview window, rather than diving back to the Print dialog.

Those of you who took a look at the preview versions of IE 6, or read about Microsoft's plans for the product, might be surprised to learn that a few things have been dropped from the final release. The controversial Smart Tags have gone, which would have allowed Microsoft to spot words on your Web pages and insert links to other sites of its choice. The previously integrated MSN Messenger has also gone.

As a Web browser, IE 6 is good. IE 5.5 is acknowledged to be a great browser, and IE 6 is much the same product. If anything, it's even more stable, especially when running under XP. Speed is a moot point - some things seem faster than IE5.5, others slower. Overall, however, speed is much the same.

Paul Ockenden

Microsoft Windows Media Player 8

I've been using Windows Media Player 8 (WMP 8) for a few weeks and the most important improvements are that, unlike its predecessor, it doesn't suck all the resources from my PC and it does appear to be extremely stable.

WMP 8 is just about everything I'm looking for in a media playback device. It makes light work of ripping CDs, converting them by default to the compact Windows Media Audio format. It supports reading and writing MP3 files, but not arch-rival RealPlayer's streaming audio or video. This rivalry is only going to end one way; WMP is the more comprehensive and flexible player and it's only the fact that Real got there first that makes it worthwhile installing its player.

The most obvious change with version 8 is the cool, non-rectangular shape to the window. It's essentially the same interface as version 7 but without the surrounding box. Version 8 comes with 19 skins but only two more visualisations.

The only new media type supported is DVD, although you still need to install a third-party software decoder. This defeats the object, as the software comes with its own interface, although WMP 8 offers a preferable non-intrusive control bar.

Perhaps most usefully, WMP 8 offers native CD burning, making it an effective one-stop shop for ripping, mixing and burning your own compilations. Transferring music to any removable medium is now simply a case of drag and drop.

Little else of significance has been added, but it's clear Microsoft wants WMP to become the default playback device and, in many cases, the only one installed. If you're used to viewing streaming sound or video, you'll probably also have to install RealPlayer and the QuickTime player, but those formats will likely suffer in time as Media Player's dominance becomes more prevalent.

Even the corporate desktop isn't safe. Version 8 offers administrators the option to specify a corporate skin and limit playback formats across a network, provided Active Directory is enabled.

WMP hits version 8 more with a whimper than a bang. Whereas version 7, whatever you thought of it, was a totally different beast to earlier incarnations, this latest version is really version 7 properly implemented.

Kevin Partner