What's Really Nice About XP?

What's Really Nice
About Windows XP?

1. It's very solid and stable. Yes, it's true. Is it unsinkable? Sure, like the Titanic. There's always something that's going to force you to restart now and then. It is Windows XP, after all. But maybe a few times a week instead of a few times a day. Now that's progress. Seriously.

2. The integrated picture viewer/e-mail wizard. In addition to providing a nifty picture viewer which lets you view pictures individually or in slide-show format, XP lets you quickly e-mail photos in a compact, net-friendly fashion.

In the old days, when you wanted to e-mail someone a photo, more often than not the photo file was huge, and you had to reduce the size somehow before you sent it (hey, you're the one who went out and bought a 6 Megapixel Fuji digital camera!). This picture-resizing required a lot of fiddling and guesswork in a photo editing program. Now when you want to e-mail a photo, XP gives you the opportunity to resize the photo in a very quick and easy fashion, and does so perfectly. No more angry e-mails from friends and associates saying, "You jerk! Why did you e-mail me an ***800MB*** file? My system's been tied up for hours...!!!"

3. System Restore. A carry-over from Windows Millennium, true, but even more effective on XP, perhaps. Whenever you're about to install a piece of hardware or software that could break XP, the program, sensing danger, creates a restore point. The amusing thing is when you go to create a restore point manually, and discover that XP automatically beat you to it, creating an automatic restore point a few minutes before! "And they laid poor John Henry in his grave, 'Lawd, 'Lawd, and they laid John Henry in his grave..."

4. Remote Assistance. Allows you to help a friend (or request help from a friend, or preferably a computer guru, if not THE Computer Guru!) remotely. Painfully slow, I'm sure, with dial-up 56K internet access, but probably pretty slick if you've got broadband at both ends. Of course, if the problem is that the system won't connect to the internet (why do sooooo many people have trouble doing this?), remote assistance can't help.

5. All those drivers!!! And the logic (plug and play) to determine exactly what gadgetry you've added to your machine (brand, model). How many hours has The Guru spent scouring the internet for drivers...modem drivers, sound card drivers, video card drivers, network interface card drivers...? Painful and incredibly time-consuming. But Windows XP has a gazillion drivers, all of them right there on that XP disk, and the plug and play works better than ever. A real boon...

6. "Nested/Stacked Taskbar Application Tiles." Okay, sorry, Microsoft must have a better name for it. BXP (Before XP), when you had multiple applications running (or even multiple iterations of the same application), each instance of the program had its own taskbar tray icon, which quickly used up the extremely limited horizontal space available on the taskbar. Now, multiple iterations of the same application (say, Internet Explorer/Netscape browser windows) are tiled or stacked in just one place, with a little number showing how many instances of the program are running. Even better, you can close them all at once by right-clicking and saying "Close All." Handy, neat!

How, when, where, why? Well, let's say I'm looking at pictures of beautiful unclothed women on the net, and (as often happens when browsing sites of this kind), about twelve different browser windows pop up...er....let's say someone I know, a friend, well he's not really a friend, just an acquaintance, let's say HE's looking at pictures of beautiful unclothed women on the net, and (as often happens to him) (so he tells me), about twelve different browser windows pop up and he can't get rid of them...in that case, the CLOSE ALL feature is very handy. It takes care of closing down each of those browser windows in one fell swoop. Whew!

7. Product Activation...just kidding!!!. Would you like to be reminded to activate your copy of Windows XP every 18 seconds, every hour of every day, for the next 30 days ? And while we're at it, would you like a .NET passport? Would you like to be reminded about that every 18 seconds, also? Would you like root canal surgery without anesthetic? Or would you like to punch Steve Ballmer in the face (and steal his wallet)???

MORE SOON...

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