Weblog
08/14/01 05:20 PM: Windows XP
Wow. I have to say, I am very impressed with Windows XP. While I did have a few small glitches while installing, the people at the super secret support newsgroups helped me figure out what was wrong. Then I was on my way. It took about, I’d say, 30 minutes to install on my Athlon 750 system.
First off, the user interface is amazing. At first, I was kind of turned off by the blue theme, but then I discovered the silver theme, which I find much more attractive. Oh, and make no mistake, that is not JPEG compression playing with your eyes. Windows XP now has “ClearType” which is an amazing way to render type. In my opinion, it makes everything much more readable. You can maybe see a better example here. Oh, and for all of you traditionalists, they included the classic theme. Here is a shot of how whichwayup looks using Cleartype and IE 6.0 XP. Remember, compare these new things with the old UI of Windows 98 SE.
Oh let me clarify one thing, ClearType is not enabled by default. However, once you turn it on, the difference is detectible. Here is a demo to show what the difference is. It’s not a whole lot, but it does make a difference.
Bottom line, I find that XP seems to perform a little bit faster than 2000, and I have not had any problems with it… yet. I like the integrated CD Writing, just drag and drop, etc. (Like DirectCD, except better). The User Interface and new features though I say make it worth the upgrade, even if only to RC2 (for $9.95).
XP is quite the operating system—The stability of 2000 with a “pretty” UI along the likes of OS X or Gnome? Wow. I’m sure I’ll be blasted by the Open Source Folks (read: dfd), but unfortunatly Linux is not compatible with all of my hardware (namely printer), but everything works with XP plus it looks good, so I give it a thumbs up.
