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1.2. What's New in Windows XP
What you'll find new in Windows XP
depends entirely on your perspective, or more specifically, the
version of Windows you used last. As described earlier in this
chapter, Windows XP is a more substantial upgrade for Windows 9x/Me
users, but that doesn't mean
there's nothing new for Windows 2000 users. Although
the following list of changes is not comprehensive, it does highlight
some of the more interesting changes for users coming from both
platforms.
1.2.1. What's New for Users of Windows 9x/Me
- As explained earlier in this chapter, the biggest change
Windows 9x/Me users will notice is the
dramatically improved stability of Windows XP.
Although applications still crash in XP, they're
much less likely to bring down the whole system. - While Windows 9x/Me would slow down after only a few hours of use
(requiring a reboot to bring it back to life), Windows XP can be left
on for weeks without so much as a hiccup. The difference is the way
system
resources, an area of memory devoted to managing running applications
and their interface elements, are handled: in Windows 9x/Me, this is
a fixed (and rather small) area of
memory, which can fill up fast. In Windows
XP, system resources are allocated dynamically, which means
you'll never run out. - While Windows 9x/Me supported
multiple users, this functionality was
never more than a way for different users to have different color
schemes and desktop icons. In Windows XP, multiple user management is
much more sophisticated. If you're using Windows XP
Professional (see the following section), a user will be able to
securely encrypt files and
folders so that other users can't read or modify
them. - Networking in Windows XP is much more
powerful and secure than in Windows 9x/Me, but is substantially
easier to set up and configure. The Network Properties window (see
Chapter 7) actually makes sense now!
1.2.2. What's New for Users of Windows 2000
- Although nearly identical to Windows 2000 under the hood, Windows XP has
some higher system requirements due to the increased overhead of all
the extra bells and whistles. While Windows 2000 requires at least a
133-Mhz Pentium-class system with 64 Mb of RAM,
Windows XP needs at least
a
300 Mhz Pentium-II processor and 128 Mb
of RAM. - Given the same hardware, Windows XP should be substantially faster
than Windows 2000. Among the areas particularly affected are startup
time and hard drive data transfer. For example, a 30 Mb file on my
system took several seconds to copy from one hard drive to another in
Windows 2000, but the same copy is nearly instantaneous in XP. - Windows XP is now the de facto standard, which means gone are the
days when new products won't be supported for your
system. However, this doesn't mean that older
product will necessarily be brought up to snuff; most likely,
existing products not supported in Windows 2000 will be retired
rather than updated to work with XP. - While many games designed for
Windows 9x would simply not run in Windows 2000, Windows XP has much
better support for games and comes with more games than Windows 2000.
1.2.3. What's New, Regardless of Your Previous OS
- Windows XP has a new, more colorful and
cheerful (some would say cartoonish) interface, although the classic
interface can be easily selected to make XP look and feel nearly
identical to Windows 2000 and Windows Me. - A new copy-protection scheme known as
Product
Activation, designed to prevent a single copy of Windows XP from
being installed on more than one machine at a time, is built into
most versions of the operating system. This is one of the most
controversial features of the system, since it requires you to
provide personal information to Microsoft and allow them to remotely
access your system. - Windows XP has more bells and whistles, such as the
Windows
Movie Maker, built-in
CD writer support, the
Internet
Connection Firewall (called the Windows Firewall in the SP2 version
of XP), and Remote Desktop Connection.
See Appendix B for more issues that affect users
upgrading to Windows XP from a previous version of Windows.
