Let me just say to begin that Windows XP is just a pretty face on top of some bug fixes for Windows 98, and if you are thinking of upgrading from windows 98, my recomendation is to upgrade to Windows 2000 which has been very stable and reliable for me. If you are still thinking of going with Windows XP Professional, read on...

I recently got a great deal on Windows XP and decided I would try to upgrade my machine from Windows 2000 Professional. This turned out to be a frustrating, buggy, and ultimately very expensive process.

The problems began during the upgrade installation. Several times, installation progress was halted to popup an interactive dialog. At one point it asked me for my Office 2000 Professional CD (what does that have to do with upgrading my computer?), and at another point it asked me to find the file: "winipsec32.sys", which I could not find. Hardly an easy installation process, and frankly much slower and more time consuming than Windows 2000 Professional.

Okay, once it was installed, I was pretty thrilled. XP is a neat new skin on the old windows. It looked different enough at first glance that I thought I had really upgraded my computer. But then I noticed that certain basic operations were really really slow. And then I tried to get online, and I began to see what XP was really all about.

Wizards. That's all it is. A pretty face and a bunch of wizards. They've hidden the ability to manually go in and fix problems; XP now automatically handles everything, and only lets you customize settings with Wizards. So when I coulnd't connect through my LAN I was stuck offline.

So the next morning, after an hour or so of mucking around the previous night, I called Microsoft technical support. I was quickly routed to an installation technician who after 30 minutes or so determined that I needed to reinstall XP. So I did. It still wouldn't connect to the LAN. Mind you, Windows 2000 installed flawlessly on this box and networking had worked like a charm. I called back. The new tech told me: "Oh, your BIOS is old, upgrade the BIOS on your motherboard, and reinstall XP."

While upgrading the BIOS on my motherboard (which was dated 1999 -- too old by Microsoft standards!!!), I somehow irreparable killed the BIOS and was stuck dead in the water. However, a brand new mother board later, and after reinstalling XP again, I still couldn't get networking to work, and this is with a 2002 dated BIOS! So I called back. This time I was more prepared: Windows XP was incorrectly detecting my Network (a Microsoft supported card, the Netgear 310TX) as an Intel card. However, even when I installed a card that it could correctly detect (an NE2000 based ISA card), I still couldn't connnect. The tech couldn't help me out, agreed that it should have correctly detected my Netgear card, and told me my only recourse was to back everything up and revert to Windows 2000. So after fifteen hours, a $64 dollar motherboard upgrade, and a great deal of frustration, I did. And now I'm out the cash for XP and a new Motherboard, and I'm back to where I was fifteen hours ago. Sigh.

So, if you want rock solid stability, a familiar user interface, and better legacy component support, stick with Windows 2000. Don't buy into the "Digital World" hype from Microsoft, Win2k is already the "digital world" enough for any user in 2002.





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