22 Feb 2003
XP is here.... first thoughts

Well, I guess I'm a day late and dollar short on moving to XP, but WTH? I always try to wait until important stuff (like, oh, operating systems, assemblers, linkers, compilers...) gets stable before I move in. Hell, I was still running C++ Builder 4 until last August. But lately too many things have been going wrong with my 98SE installation - it was time for a change.

So I went with XP Pro. Two hundred dollars for the upgrade. Whew! I'd run NT 4 when I was with Bridgecom, and learned to despise it and it's idiotic (and constant) BSODs. Of course, we were kinda pushing the platform to it's outer limits, running 1024 vocie lines into each server. But I couldn't play DOOM .... that was a killer.

So far, XP has indeed been stable. I've rebooted it a blue million time, 'tis true, but only for installations. Why M$ can't seem to fix the 'boot whenever you change a system setting' is beyond me. I ran a Slackware box for nearly two years without booting once. And the Mac (running OS X 10.2.4) is stable as can be. Although I will confess that Apple boogered the transition to Jaguar a bit - I had to use my Apple Care connections to get it straight.

But what I don't like about XP is the LAF (look and feel). Too gaudy, too, well, boisterous in a grade school kind of way. The default UI schemes are nearly day-glo in intensity. But it is configurable - you can get back to the "classic" Windows look and feel, if you know where to look and what to feel for.

None of my old UI themes will read into XP, so I managed to recreate them piecemeal. Cursors, sounds, icons, syles and colors now make my desktop look like I expect it to look on a Win32 box. Call me an old fogy, but as much time as I spend in front of this terminal the last thing I need to learn a new UI paradigm. I even copied the old Windows notepad program over and reassociated it with text files. The new one had different keystrokes for searching (no more Alt-S-F) and F3 to continue, oh, no - now it's the modern Windows verison of POSIX compliance with Ctrl-F and Ctrl-G.

It's funny, really - I use those keystrokes all the time on Unix boxen - but on Windows, well, it just seems odd. Old habits are the hardest to break I guess, and I've been doing Windows since before 3.0

PGP 7.0.3 broke, as well as McAfee, and my Adobe Acrobat needs reinstalled to get the printer driver correct. I doubt that I'll actually bother with that latter one, though, as I hardly ever use it since we got the G4, which runs on PDF's and PostScript quite naturally.

I may finally break down and install Word 2000, though - I'm still using 97, but I gotta move it off of C for want of space. So, if I gotta move it, why not just upgrade? I've got a couple of legal copies running around here.

Mozilla was kinda trippy - the XP upgrade installer didn't move any of it's profiles, so it started out by trying to copy my very old Netscape 4.7 profile and then going into Profile Manager at startup. But once I found out where XP stores profiles, it was a snap to move it over and get it going.

I did buy a new virus scanner. (With Windows that's not a luxury!) I'll be installing and configuring most of the weekend, I reckon. Oh well - let it snow!

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