Microsoft Windows XP

Operating System Review

To paraphrase Robert Duvall's famous line from the movie Apocalypse Now, ''I love the smell of marketing money burning in the morning.'' Microsoft is certainly burning a lot of money over Windows XP editions, and there might be a pleasant XPerience for VARs and resellers.

XP is the merger of kernels between DOS and NT-based Windows. NT has typically been more stable than Windows 9x as a result of controls placed on applications and drivers used in NT/Windows 2000. In fact, the screws are turned pretty tight in Windows XP to prevent crashes through driver madness and core application revision synchronization problems. For this, you can alternately have a sigh of relief or scream about the past six years of problems with Windows stability. I'll choose the sigh.

There are two editions of XP: Home and Professional. Windows .NET is the server version (once known as Windows 2002) and won't be released until at least Q2 of 2002. XP Home is a subset of Professional. It's stripped down dramatically and specifically targeted at residential/small biz installations. You can't log on to a domain with XP Home. No backup software is included. Only PPTP-based VPNs are allowed (natively).

The upshot of XP Home is that it includes two residential/small business features that were add-ins before: a firewall, and a proxy/NAT server that allows XP Home to be the router/fire-wall/Internet connection-sharing nexus for home networks. To make things brighter, there's lots of support for Wireless Ethernet (a.k.a. IEEE 802. 11b).

What'll attract people to XP Home is its backward compatibility with many apps (including many games) that they've used with Windows 9x/Millennium Edition, luxurious multimedia (there's a price paid, read on), and comparatively crash-proof operation.

Professional, by contrast, has all that plus the ability to be authenticated in a domain, Microsoft's Active Directory or a NetWare directory/eDirectory. This differentiation alone is a strong reason to have your clients avoid the Home Edition. The downside is that many OEMs have already contracted to use Home Edition as the default choice for their machinery. You'll have to explain to users why they can't authenticate.

We found that virtually all the hardware we ran in our labs could be upgraded to Windows XP Professional (or Home) with surprising ease. However, we did discover that the TWAIN API set is no longer supported - a show-stopper for many sites with multi-function printer/scanner devices, or OCR scanning. Few vendors have replacements for TWAIN yet and may not have drivers until Q1 or Q2 2002.

If you've got the XP Professional Edition, you'll also be able to apply Microsoft's increased number of group policies on XP. As XP is largely a makeover of Windows 2000, the W2K policies work (all 800 plus of them) along with 200 new XP policies. All of this has been done not only to allow extremely articulate desktop management (and lock-downs where necessary) but also to enable use of the vague feature set once known as IntelliMirror.

The mobility features of IntelliMirror were designed to allow users to log on at any workstation, and get their desktop. That's been largely perfected, and group policies are far easier to set up. This also means that multi-shift operations that use the same PC for three or four shifts can have a great deal of partitioning among the several users of that PC. You might see system administrators actually liking policies for the first time.

In all, XP is all that we were promised with Windows 2000. It's reliable, given that it's built on Win 2000 Professional. The multimedia functions via the new version of Windows Media Player (V8) are stunning. There's a security risk in that Internet apps no longer play inside the kernel (called non-root sockets access), and hackers or automated security threats might use that unbridled access for even more interesting havoc on local networks. The included firewall is no substitute for a personal security management application.

There are a few privacy concerns, too: it's easy to disable the offending parts. However, you have to register the product, and this also sets a precedent: if you move the license to another machine, you'll have to explain why. Piracy of XP will be minimal, but there's a slight hassle involved.

How much?

Windows XP Professional $499
XP Professional Upgrade $319
Windows XP Home Edition $319
XP Home Edition Upgrade $159

Copyright 2001 Micromedia Limited Canadian Business and Current Affairs Copyright 2001
Rogers Media Inc. Channel Business November 19, 2001, BYLINE: Henderson, Tom