History shows that Microsoft often achieves what it sets out to do, but you usually have to take whatever timeline they give and double it.
The company has wanted a single Windows operating system since the days of Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 95, but only six years later is that becoming a reality.
The second beta of Microsoft's Windows XP came out in late March in Home and Professional Editions. The Home Edition will replace Windows 98/98SE/Millennium Edition, and uses the Windows NT core technology originally written for corporations.
The beta 2 of the Home Edition is a big improvement in stability over previous generations, and has several useful features for people who always keep their computers online.
Gone is the crash-if-you-sneeze instability of the 9x code base and in its place the solid performance of NT. At the same time, it's as mindful of system resources as the 9x code base, while not including features geared to corporations.
The Home Edition is basically the professional version on a major diet. It does not include corporate features such as remote access, network backup or file encryption -- nothing a home user would miss.
Home networking has been given a considerable facelift due to the growing number of homes with multiple PCs. Windows XP comes with Ethernet, IEEE 1394 (Firewire), HomePNA and 802.11b wireless networking support, covering all the bases of home networks.
A much-improved Home Networking Wizard lets users set up each computer, connecting them to the Internet either directly or through another computer. The wizard also prompts you to set up the Internet Connection Firewall, the first time Microsoft has put this security software into a consumer OS. The firewall uses active packet filtering, meaning it keeps ports to the Internet open only when the user is actually going out on the Internet.
A useful feature for people who work from multiple locations is the network location awareness, which allows you to have two separate network configurations on a laptop. It detects where the laptop is (home or office) and adjusts the settings accordingly.
Some networking pieces of the Home Edition are still unfinished, most notably file and print sharing. Sharing a drive has been disabled for now. On my home network, the Windows XP machine sees the Window 2000 and Windows 98 drives with no problems and automatically discovers shared folders. But the Windows 2000/98 machines couldn't access drives stored on XP machines. Hopefully, it will all be fixed by final release.
On a 128-MB system, Windows XP Home Edition takes up 56 MB of memory, while Windows ME uses 61 MB and Windows 2000 Professional 72 MB. That's all the more impressive given all the extra stuff that Microsoft has incorporated that you wouldn't necessarily think was core to an operating system.
Much of the new goodies are part of the Windows Media Player 8, such as interface updates and a new compression algorithm for Windows Media Audio files to make them half the size of an MP3 file.
Entertainment enthusiasts should appreciate XP's new DVD playback, CD ripper and the ability to drag music from a compact disc to a CD-R for drag-and-drop burning. Because the features are buried so far into the OS (and perhaps to entice upgrades), the new player will only be available for Windows XP users.
My favorite games, Deus Ex, Quake 3 and EverQuest, all run as well as they do on Win98, and Deus Ex runs much faster than it did under Windows 2000.
Windows XP comes with Internet Explorer 6, the latest version of the browser, which includes a new Personal Bar that looks an awful lot like the MySidebar in Netscape 6. It's integrated with MSNBC.com for news and stock reports, and also supports third-party Personal Bars, most of which are integrated with other Microsoft sites like Expedia and MSN.
IE 6 supports the current Internet technology standards such as the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1, that keeps it on par with Netscape 6. Outlook Express 6 also sports some improvements, including virus and spam filters and support for multiple e-mail accounts.
You may have problems getting used to Windows XP's rearranging of much of the infrastructure from Windows 9x, which makes it hard to find some files and utilities like defrag.
Still, Windows XP in its current state is an improvement over Windows ME and a much better choice for a stable OS than Windows 2000. When it's finally released this fall, it will likely be worth the upgrade.
At the very least, when people buy a new computer with XP they won't have to reach for their Windows 98SE CD to remove it, like many Windows ME users did.
Like most past betas, the public is invited to take part by paying a small fee, in this case $9.95.
And if you don't like the intrusive nature of the beta's activation key, just poke around on the Internet for a utility called MuteXP. It will remove the registry entries and the DLL (dynamic link library) file required for activation.
