Living with Windows XP

XP: Released last week

BBC News Online's Paul Rocks explains what it has been like living with an evaluation copy of Windows XP for the last couple of months.

The last time I installed an operating system, Windows 2000, I was at my wits' end. A lot of my hardware had not been recognised and the long search for drivers followed.

However, six weeks ago, I decided to upgrade and, being a glutton for punishment, installed an evaluation version of Windows XP.

I had heard that its biggest feature was stability, and it was this that tempted me.

The upgrade from W2K worked without a problem. The first thing I noticed was the "new hardware found" icon that appeared on my screen. And before I could take any action, "new hardware installed" followed.

I expected that the W2K drivers would still work, but I did not think there would be updated drivers.

But the generic drivers were gone. My 1998 Yamaha Waveforce PCI soundcard was correctly identified and the modem, printer, SCSI, CDR and scanner all followed. These were all new drivers.

If you download or install a driver that causes trouble, there is a useful rollback facility in Device Manager that reinstalls the older version.

Up and running

So that was it - hardware up and running and ready to go online thanks to Internet Explorer 6.0, which is bundled in the operating system. I was amazed to discover firewall software also included.

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I did not particularly like the redesigned interface at the start but, after a day or two, it grew on me.

So, has XP lived up to all those claims from Microsoft?

I mainly use my PC for multi-track audio recording. It took me a long time to set up Windows 98 and W2K for this purpose. When it worked it was good, but too many good takes were lost because of system crashes.

On XP, I've had 18 large audio tracks running simultaneously using Cubase VST with up to ten plug-ins and the operating system remained stable.

The one problem I had was when a particular plug-in could not support the sample rate I was working at. Previously this error would have been fatal but with XP only the plug-in crashed and Cubase kept running. No data was lost.

Windows Media Player 8 comes as part of XP and is very much an all-round package, covering several audio formats, video and radio. It will also rip CDs to Microsoft's own audio compression format, WMA, and facilitates writing to CD.

So far so good

All this kit seems to work fairly well, but I found moving through MP3 playlists to be slow and would use other dedicated software for some of these functions.

Windows Media Player also works with most radio and video formats but some organisations, including the BBC, encode using RealNetworks software and you will need to download a version of Real Player for this.

When I tried to watch video on BBC News Online something happened which typifies Windows XP.

It deduced what software was needed and provided a web link to download Real Player.

The reason I say this is typical is because this operating system presumes you are not a technical genius and if something is wrong, it usually fixes it.

When I was loading Office 2000 it proceeded to overwrite some XP files. I was prompted to insert the operating system disk and the problem was duly solved. I found many similar examples of this.

Spyware?

Another feature is the error report facility. When I crashed the Cubase plug-in, I was asked if I wanted an error report sent to Microsoft.

Some people have referred to this as spyware, but I know that others like me will be happy to send the reports to Microsoft if it means a fix can be written into a Windows update.

Some technophiles have been critical of the way the operating system assumes you are not a rocket scientist but a novice can use this system easily.

My six weeks with XP have been pleasurable. No system crashes, no major problems and no phone-a-friend to sort out areas I don't understand. Just the way it should be.