I hated XP because you had so little control over it . . . O'Reilly's XP Hacks helps. There is simply too much going on in the background, and you can't shut down everything but systray and explorer like you could in earlier versions.

Oh, thanks alot. The new computer, sitting on the floor, ready to be changed out, has Windows XP loaded. Now what? Will it do for not fancy stuff? I really only use MS Internet Browser, the MS email, Words, Excell, and can use Access, if I every get around to inputting my book collection.

Since I'm not in the Word Processing work-world anymore, I just keep information, mostly for reference when my creative light bulb suddenly goes on (gardening, sewing, quilting, and crafts information).

I've read that the new Office software is way overboard with too many applications that will never be used for that price. True or False?

Thanks for any information and suggestions.

Anne - You ain't lying bout that. I'm a *NIX person, and the only reason I sometimes use a Windows client in my job is for the non M$ Informix ODBC drivers which allow me to extract data from an Informix database into some M$ product such as Access or Excel so I can email spreadsheets to people who have no idea there is anything other than M$.

I will say though, MT is eaiser to drive in IE than Mozilla.

I feel naked without a real shell.

Anna - you're good to go. For anything not mission critical - Windows will do just fine - although I prefer Linux running X, and either Gnome or KDE.

Where ya been?

Anna - True!!!

Anna - by "where ya been", I mean I haven't heard from you in a while. I dun red what I righted and thought it sounded like I's downing you on some tech issue.

Hehe.

Well, i think Windows XP is just a windows for you mothers and grand mothers anyway.

Me, i use windows 98se and windows XT with a dual boot utility.

If we the end-users would just NOT buy anymore of this hideous software or buy from the computer makers that force it upon us ,we could put a stop to this. We dont buy , changes will HAVE to be made. That simple..I REALLY wish people would start to read the "end user" agreements and see whats going on, it's crazy to agree to these things.Learn to SAY NO not complain on message boards.

Say NO to product activation/hidden processes by NOT buying it ! Seems most people (not aware) like XP and along with this they send the signal that software activation/hidden processes are ok , it's NOT.

Want to surf the world without any trace of tracking or privacy issues ?? Buy a shortwave radio :-)

One last thing , where are the smart people in this world ???? cant anybody come up with an easy to use for the masses ,straight forward operating system ?????

I haven't got a fucking clue why the XP always crashse! I just got a message that NOT RESPONDING! So will Bill Gates respond me! Thanks I don't need! 'cause they all the same! XP is the same as Bill Gates

It would be cool if I could get XP SUCKS instead the NOT RESPONDING when my computer tells me what's going on in the XP

Internet is the force to be reckoned with

I dont know either, The combination XP powerpoint, and dual monitors do NOT mix! I have a NEW 3Ghz pet 4 with 2Gig ram new XP and new Office 2003 powerpoint, and new ATI 9600XT dual card. Will NOT work at all with this combination. Freezes/slows. I installed several new dual cards. did NOT work. I uninstalled office 2003 powerpoint and installed 2000, did NOT work either. Works fine on windows 2000 with any combination. New active X new direct X, all the updates and patches. IT SUCKS!

I personally am a windows user, not by option but by force as if I want to browse the internet, microsoft has asked companies to make their website mess with non-IE browsers. If I want to play a game, it will only work with XP. Another annoyance is the constant updating. While recieving "better" OSes, we need to constantly blow cash on a computer as Redmond makes their microshit eat so much RAM and CPU cycles. We are not e"xp"erencing faster computers, we are simply helping microsoft rub intel's and memory manufacters backs. Did you know IE 6 had a bug that was patched after it was found that sometimes, IE 6 ate 100+ MB of RAM!!!!!

In a perfect world, only gamers would need to upgrade anything. Your OS wouldn't secretly phone home about your hard-drive. (Find-Fast or Indexing service.) You wouldn't be worried about your privacy (there is a file called index.dat that is super hidden and records every website you ever see). A decent operating system wouldn't cost more than a decent computer. (Windows 2000 Professional Full version is $300 now-a-days) There would be no registry to **** up your computer and invite malware. Your hard-drive wouldn't need to be at-least 60GB of you didn't own a camera.

Sadly, perfect is a long ways off.

dave

you just described a good *nix installation.

Windows XP sucks crap! ( And because it's closed source, you can't change text ) I use Linux, in fact I removed XP from my computer.

Well Tony, you can change text, but you need to hack Windows to do it. Linux is easily customizable as there are many mods for it because it is open source. Windows sucks I know, but it's the easiest to use and EVERYTHING works on it. =/

XP sucks.
My win 98 is amazingly stable compared to my XP Piece of junk computer

Bogus automobiles get recalls, don't they?
Once I got DSL and the anti-spyware etc., tyhere are major conflicts with various software I require.

Outlook express is exceptionally lame. I have a whole procedure to go through to send an e-mail.

In addition there are too many features which I will never use that bog down the (Brand new) system.

Windows 98 was a champ, and way more secure (?)
except I have to buy all new MS software to run on my new XP machine.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

You have to buy a Mac computer to run software written for Mac OS X. In that way it is worse monopoly than MS. No commercial OS is needed for general PC use, I think.

You have to buy a Mac computer to run software written for Mac OS X. In that way it is worse monopoly than MS. No commercial OS is needed for general PC use, I think.

You have to buy a Mac computer to run software written for Mac OS X. In that way it is worse monopoly than MS. No commercial OS is needed for general PC use, I think.

After pulling large sums of hair out trying to get a few command line programs running under Windows X-Pee, I typed in WINDOWS XP SUCKS and I found this web site with your short, but to the point review of XP. BRAVO! It really does suck. It has some serious "issues" with doing simple things like sharing files (easy nuf to do in Linux or W2K, but it is dumbed down so much in XP you can't figure out what they are even asking you even if you understand what is happening at the lowest levels of the network...). Why have they done this? Are they on DRUGS? (really bad drugs?)

XP blows ass, half the programs i used to run on Windows ME don't work, i keep getting the "not responding" and "send error report" garbage

Windows XP blows goats. I seriously don't know how they make people pay for that utter goat feces. XP pro w/ its reverse compatability option pretends to be advanced, but in actuality, seldom works the way you intended. Maybe XP rev. compatability works for games, but most certainly not for hardware.

And true to the Megacrap (Microsoft) tradition- XP crashes like hell.

And unless you're UBER nazi about anti virus / Internet security- you can count on a monthly / bimonthly HD format (if you browse/ download heavily). Also at times, external devices (ex: my sony USB DVDRW) fails to get detected about 30-40% of the time and at random times, commands such as "paste", "copy" ceases functioning (I can't select when I right click).

Hardware is supposed to run for many months at a go without crashing. But they crash on a weekly / daily/ hourly basis with the Windows platform.

And their default programs & settings makes me want to go rape an extinct wooly mammoth out of sheer frustration and out of utter moronic design layout. Why the F#$K can't I "undo" more than 3 times in MS paint? Why can't I open a large text file using NOTEPAD. Why is there a NOTEPAD for small txt files but a doc viewer for a larger files? This is retarded. You can get a Nodepad++ plugin, but that again makes the XP system more unstable (more crashes) and about 70% of the time- the SAVE function don't work w/ NP++.

And JRE native programs such as Azureus P2P torrent programme doesn't integrate too well into Windows and it's kind of superior to Utorrent of Windows.

And as far as video viewing goes, even with an OK Nvidia GEFORCE 5500 256mb video card w/ 1GB RAM on the CPU, and with the latest DivX and M$$$ codecs, the video output of DVDs or AVIs still blows dog crap compared to Linux Mplayer's xv codec!

Seriously, get a decent enough Linux platform (like Ubuntu 7) and take a dump on Microsoft...their WIndows products do kinda blow...especially XP.

vista owns xp :)