Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

The AIM service is aped by Microsoft's Windows Messenger. That said, although there are some interesting features added with Windows Messenger - such as voice and video communication in addition to text, and the sharing of applications and whiteboard drawings on top of simple file transfers - the additions aren't features used that prevalently. Simply installing AIM straight after the XP installation doesn't solve the problem of the default installation of Windows Messenger. Although, thankfully, Windows Messenger is no longer integrated into the OS as originally planned, it still pops up annoyingly in the systray should you open IE 6 (also installed by default) or Outlook.

There's no obvious way to prevent Windows Messenger installing or even to switch it off once it's installed, and putting this question to the Help files provides no answers. For those interested in ridding their machine of Windows Messenger, I detail one method in my column this month (see p146 of the December 2001 issue), although it's not for the light-hearted. As for simply disabling the service, it's a little easier in that you open the program from the Systray icon or Programs menu and go to Tools | Options | Preferences to deselect the 'Run this program when Windows starts' checkbox. This seems to abate both the IE 6 and Outlook pop-ups too.

Other features integrated into the XP's core include a text-to-speech translator and Windows Movie Maker, which is looked at in greater depth in Multimedia matters (see p214 of the December 2001 issue).

Windows' handling of digital cameras also deserves a special mention. Now you just need to plug in your USB-connected camera and once the driver has been installed a removable storage device folder appears that automatically loads the pictures taken. This worked for all the suitably equipped digital cameras in this month's digital cameras Labs.

The new Explorer viewing functions are further enhanced with a Printing Wizard that optimises your quality settings for the paper of your choice (although tweaking is available) and even offers various layout options to fit as many pictures to those expensive sheets of photo paper as possible. By and large, the quality of photos printed on default settings is hardly distinguishable from using the printer's own options tabs. You could certainly improve upon the quality through proper photo app tweaking, although the standard results are satisfactory. The only complaint is that the cropping of pictures seems to be a bit haphazard, and in most instances where the picture size isn't standard, it produces unsatisfactory results.

New explorations

Apart from extra viewing functions, Explorer now makes it possible to group files and folders into personally meaningful structures. You can, for instance, choose data embedded in the file (meta data such as ID3 tags is a good example) as your chosen sorting details to create folders such as MP3 libraries. These will sort artists into groups, albums into subgroups and display song titles, bit-rate details, track numbers or more, just as it should be displayed. This approach can obviously be applied in other ways such as sorting by document author, date of file creation and so on. One complaint, however, is that you can only apply these sorting/grouping options onto whole open folders with no access to subfolders' contents in the process. This is a shame, as it means you'll eventually have huge folders of files that will depend on this new feature, although they won't be easy to navigate by any other application that doesn't sort/group in this way.