| |
 |
|
Date |
: Apr 28th, 2001 |
| Category |
: Operating System |
| Publisher |
: Microsoft |
| Author |
: Peter Novotny |
|
Installation
As is tradition since Windows NT and Windows 98, just insert the bootable CD and the install starts. (I started with a clean hard drive - I did not do an upgrade).
At first I ran into major trouble. The computer would boot, the setup screen would show up, but as soon as I would get to the "Welcome to Whistler Install" screen, my computer would blue screen. After about 15 minutes of changing stuff around, I figured out that my SCSI card was no longer natively supported under Whistler (funny because under 2000 it came right up). So I switched to an IDE CD-ROM and everything started working all right (I did not want to mess with supplying drivers on a floppy at the beginning).
The installation is very similar to Windows 2000 install (that might change). You have to make your way through the usual text fields (name, company, product ID), and answer a few questions about what features to install. If you are on a network, you will be presented an option to configure your network connection (IP, DNS name, Gateway, WINS address..). After about 20 - 30 minutes, the install finished (I did not do an exact time measurement - if enough people are interested in how long it really takes I will install it again and time it -
e-mail me if you want to know).
After the one last reboot, I was presented with the familiar Windows 2000 wizard that asked me which users I wanted to give access to the computer. As I was going through this, I noticed that there are more default groups (remote users, and others) available then there were in Windows 2000 (more on this later).
First Impressions
I have seen Whistler before because I installed Beta 1 when it first came out last year. The interface is very clean looking, the default theme is very smooth (I did not care for the "stretched" background picture). There is one very annoying thing though, the drop down menus have a slight delay, which can be really frustrating. I have looked around for different settings but I was not unable to change the delay anywhere. There is an option in the Taskbar control panel to "Animate the task bar" which makes it even slower.
First thing I did when I logged in was to see how much RAM was being used (Beta 1 of Whistler was using 100 MB with no programs running!). With no programs running and nothing installed, memory usage was at 86 megs. (the default page file size is 550MB!!!!! this makes the installation take up 1.6GB of hard drive space!!) That is slightly more then Windows 2000 which has memory usage of about 75 MB. There are many new background services in Windows XP (more on this later). As I was checking out task manager, I noticed that there is a new tab called networking. This is cool because it shows you how many bytes received/sent/total. This is a lot better then Windows 2000 which just tells you how many packets have been sent.
|
|
