BlueSmoke - Review : Microsoft Windows XP Beta 2 - Part I

		Date	: Apr 28th, 2001
		Category	: Operating System
		Publisher	: Microsoft
		Author	: Peter Novotny

I was fortunate enough to get my hands on the newly released Beta 2 of Windows XP (formerly Whistler) Professional. Before we begin, let me mention a few things. Windows XP is based on Windows NT and Windows 2000 - thus giving us full 32-bit support. This was supposed to be done for Windows ME but Microsoft changed their mind and made Windows ME and extension of the Windows 9x kernel. Windows XP comes is several different flavors. There is Home Edition, XP Professional, XP Server and XP Advanced Server. I decided to do a review of the Professional version, since it will have more features that I can report on (this review will need to have many different parts since there is so much new stuff to report on). Some of the features that Windows XP includes are remote installation, remote control troubleshooting, direct writing to CDs without using third-party software, system restore, device driver rollback, Internet connection firewall, increased application compatibility (by using run in compatibility mode - more on this later), web update of files before installing the OS, wireless networking and many others. For a complete list of features, visit Microsoft's XP site. When talking about Windows XP we cant overlook the new controversial registration scheme that Microsoft has come up with for this new OS. It will require you to register your copy with Microsoft every time you install the software. It sends them a unique ID along with the product key on the back of the CD. The unique ID is dependent on what hardware is in your computer. (look here for the description of this new registration scheme). [Ed : Kyle over at [H]ard|OCP has a short article on this.] The minimum system requirements for XP are : Pentium 233, 64 MB RAM, 650 MB free space, VGA monitor, keyboard, mouse and a CD-ROM. These are minimum requirements, I don't see how Whistler would run on this machine, it would be hell of slow. I am running a T-Bird 900 on an ASUS A7V with 384 MB PC 133 Crucial RAM, 8 gig Fujitsu HD, nVIDIA Riva TNT, SMC 10/100 NIC, Sound Blaster Live!, Diamond FirePort SCSI card, a Teac CD-ROM and a Pinnacle Micro CD burner.

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.

Task Bar

The task bar and the Start menu have gotten a whole new look also. The Start menu is highly customizable. It is split into two panes. On the left side is a list of frequently used/last accessed programs. On the right are shortcuts to My Computer, My Documents and all of the other default MS folders. (I have to repeat this: it is very annoying to click on the Start Menu -> programs because it takes about half a second for the programs menu to show up. I find it a waste of time, I am used to clicking on it and programs showing up - not taking a second or so to show up. Like I have said already, the Start Menu is very customizable. There is also a new feature: when you click on the Task Bar, there is an option of locking it, which prevents accidental moves to different sides of the screen.

Another very interesting feature : as I was working, I noticed that some of my icon on the task bar (next to the clock - such as volume, network activity, AIM, MSN messenger and others) disappeared. Instead, there was an arrow pointing to the right, once I moved my mouse over the arrow, it announced that it hid some of the least used icons and hid them. I was then presented with an option to disable this function (which I did). I don't see how this would be a useful thing, unless you wanted to hide some of the icons, but I always want to know what is running in the background so for me it is useless.

CD Burning

One of the very cool features is burning CD's without the need for a third party software. Windows XP has the feature built in. The process is very simple. All you have to do is insert a blank CD, drag files and folders onto the CD (using Windows Explore or My Computer view) and then once you are done, right click on the CD or use the context sensitive My computer view and say Write-CD. On a 12x burner, it took 12 minutes to make a complete 640MB data CD. I made two CD's and no coasters, also I was able to still use different programs. Check out these screenshots :

The biggest change to the interface is the context sensitive menu in My Computer / Windows Explorer. It changes according to what folder/drive/device is selected, and so far I have not been able to disable it. It gives you access to items which are usually available when right clicking. As you can see, it is very distracting when browsing the contents of folders/drives. The picture on the right is Windows Explorer view and the left picture is My Computer view of the same folder.

Quite a few other things have changed as well. Here are some other screenshot of how to look of Windows has changed :

This came up after I inserted the CD I just burned, since there is no auto start on this data CD, Windows wanted to know what I to do with the CD - it would be useful if you had a CD full of pictures... Notice how it says Windows 2000? Somebody at Microsoft forgot to change this registry key...

This is a screen shot of IE downloading, notice the cool looking green status bar.. it is very eye pleasing... This is what the Connect To dialog box looks like (notice the temporary bitmap text), this is what comes up when trying to connect to shared drive on another computer.

After I plugged my camera into the USB port, this bubble popped up... Nice little pop-up telling that the print job was finished instead of an annoying message on the screen. This browsing the My Pictures folder. Notice how the folder icon is made up out of four pictures, very nice....

This was rather interesting, when I choose optimize, it gave me a choice whether I wanted to have a 640x480 or 800x600 or 1280x768 picture. A very interesting new feature built into every Windows XP (home or professional), it is supposed to like Terminal Services for Windows NT. It will allow support personnel to remotely connect to your machine and make changes/fix stuff. I will have to investigate this further, and will report on this later.

Microsoft claims "out of the box compatibility for all your applications". Looks like this will be achieved by letting your application be run in "Compatibility Mode". This dialog box show up after right clicking on a shortcut and choosing properties. Another one of those things that I will have to look into and report on later. Very interesting, Windows supports 7.1 channel speaker system - NICE!

Oh, look at those nice two color volume sliders! I noticed a new tab when looking at the Date and Time properties - the Internet Time - very cool, Windows lets you synch your clock with one of the time servers!

There a couple of other interesting things that I have come across while using Whistler. First, when customizing Task Bar, I have come across an option which allows to choose which icons are hidden from the tray. Another is the Desktop Cleanup Wizard. After leaving my computer on overnight, I had this dialog box opened on the desktop "Welcome to the Desktop Cleanup wizard", turns out that this will move all of your unused icons on the desktop to a Unused Desktop Icons folder. This could be useful for people who have tons of icons of the desktop and do not know how to get rid of them or are afraid to.

One big problem was copying files across the network. It would almost halt the whole machine. The OS became very unresponsive, I had to wait until the network transfer was finished.

This is shaping to be a very good OS. It has a lot of new features. It is very processor intensive. I have noticed a little slower response time from when I was running Windows 2000. It is just a Beta2 release, after this there should be Beta 3, then RC1 and RC2 and then the final release, so we still have a few versions to go before the final stable version will come out. For now I am very happy with it. I have not tried playing any games nor have ran any benchmarks, this will be done in the upcoming reviews. If you want to be e-mailed when I post this information, send me an e-mail.