Ok, being a rather poor college student, I was a bit skeptical about whether or not I should shell out the kizash to purchase myself a copy of Microsoft's latest OS offering. I'd been running Win98 SE for quite some time, and was fairly happy with it. I know 98 inside and out, and therefore I had it running and booting very fast, and quite stable to boot. Eventually, I decided to bite the bullet, and shell out the cash for a copy of XP Professional. I opted to go with Professional as opposed to home for a few reasons: 1. My system is a somewhat 'multi-user' system. A lot of my friends use my computer (with my permission of course) and I liked XP Pro's added filesystem security, along with it's extra features, such as Remote Desktop, and IIS capabilities. 2. I was a little wary of the very concept of the 'home' version of the OS. The last OS that Microsoft produced for 'home' use was the abysmal Windows Millenium Edition, which was a godawful horrible pile of poopsocks.




Anyway, without further ado, here is the Patented Action Snark Rundown of Windows XP Professional:

The Install: The install actually went quite smoothly. I had to do the usual input the serial number from the little authenticity thingy, let XP copy it's files, and I finally had to 'activate' the darn thing. Installation actually went quite smoothly. I have fairly common hardware, and XP didn't seem to take exception to any of it. I made sure to download nVidia's latest Detonator drivers and get them installed. Aside from size, the installation went smooth as silk. I had to reinstall a few programs, but other than that, no problems at all. Installation gets an 9 out of 10 for being smooth and easy.

The Look:XP comes with a spiffy, sassy new GUI environment. Those of you coming from win 98 or win2k will feel pretty much right at home. The start menu and toolbar are pretty much the same, with a few nice new features. The start menu is now much larger, and far better organized.
One section of the start menu is now populated by programs you've used frequently/recently, which is really nice if you want quick access to frequently used programs, but don't want to clutter your desktop with another shortcut. Also, the taskbar has become a little bit 'smarter'. You can now configure it to hide tray icons you aren't using, and it will group taskbar icons by type.

XP again includes multiple desktop themes, with a few default ones included. However, Microsoft has cut a deal with Stardock, the makers of the WindowBlinds window manager. With WindowBlinds, XP's GUI is fully skinnable. Don't like the default themes avalible? Simply zip on over to www.wincustomize.com or any of a dozen other skin sites, and browse to your heart's desire. WindowBlinds takes a little while to learn, but the learning curve isn't very steep at all.

Also, I'd highly recommend cruising on over to www.tweakxp.com and surfing the site there, and downloading TweakXP. TweakXP allows you to further tweak the look and performance of XP, which enhances an already great look and feel. Big Bill's XP Rodeo scores a perfect 10 out of 10 for having a great default look, and being customizeable to a fare-thee-well.



Performance: XP does run, I'll tell you that. Compatibility issues are almost nonexistant, though a few small ones are still there. So far, XP has been incredibly stable in the month I've been running it. I've had programs lock up perhaps 10 times, and not a single one of those problems went beyond killing the process in the process manager. Not once has a program crash taken my system down, which was a daily occurance with Win 98. I don't have any hard numbers yet, but most of my games and applications seem to be running slightly faster under XP than 98. XP actually boots a bit more slowly than 98 did for me, but I'm chalking that up to the fact that I've not yet learned how to tweak XP's boot sequence like I could with 98. So far, XP has the best of both worlds, in my opinion. It's got 98's hardware compatibility, and 2000's stability, without 2000's pesky gaming issues. Of course, all this roadrunneresque speed comes at a price. XP is very resource hungry. According to my monitoring software, the OS itself eats anywhere from 100 to 130 mb of RAM just sitting there. While I've got plenty of RAM to spare (384mb total), I really would not recommend running XP on a box with anything less than 256mb. Microsoft recommends a bare minimum of a 300mhz clock speed, but I'd say you need to be running at a far higher speed to really get the full benefit of XP's capabilities. Add to that the rather large size of XP compared to 98SE, and you see that performance really does come at a price. Performance rates a solid 7 out of 10 for excellent performance and stability, but at a price of high resource use.


Overall:Windows XP will get the Snark stamp of approval. It's by far the best MS operating system I've had experience with. It's speedy, easy to use, and stable. There are some things that I don't like, such as the OS constantly wanting to fire off information about you and your computer to Microsoft, and some needless componants that are installed and run by default, but those concerns can be solved with a little gratuitious tweaking. If you are already running Win98 SE, Win ME, or Win2000, you need only shell out $99 for an upgrade to XP Home, or $150 for XP Pro. If you have the extra fifty bones, I'd recommend going with XP Professional. It has some nice extra features and functionality that are more than worth the extra clams

Recommended: Yes