Time for Microsoft to go the OS X way. Review on Windows XP

Ok before I Begin, let me clarify that this review maybe biased agains't windows users. I believe that Microsoft is the root cause of all the wrong things in the present day.

They clamed that Windows XP was stable. I tried out both the home and the professional versions hoping that microsoft would have learnt something from their past mistakes. It did look impressive, I mean the new desktop with the new style menus etc, but sadly it was the same thing. Internet Explorer, the so called most popular browser on the planet is also the most vulnerable one. It is an open invitation to spam and virus attacks. Microsoft needs to reconsider its social engineering of its products. I agree they might be easier to get used to, but are they good? I beg to differ.

XP occupies a huge space on my hard drive, I hope some day the programmers at Microsoft realise that no one is interested in their easter eggs, in an already bulky OS. The home edition of XP simply sucks, I am still not sure why they need to make the distinction, the lure of money I guess.

Another irritating feature of XP, I found was the activation scheme with Service pack 1. In a corporate environment, this is real painful feature. And it looks flawed. If they really wanted people to stop using pirated versions, they would have thought of a better way of looking at things. The method employed by Microsoft looks archaic and pure nonsense. And if your copy of XP expires after a month, I coudn't even find a way to change the PK. You can log into safe mode, but when you choose to boot with the networking option, XP just refuses to behave.

Customization is another poor feature, If you don't like the new desktop, you do have an option of sticking to the classic windows desktop. But it ends there. There are third party S/W that help you to change the appearance of your desktop but they make your system ten times more unstable. On the other hand if you use Linux, you can configure your desktop any way you want it to. You are probably limited only by your imagination.

Hardware: XP is a resource hungry brute of an OS that works best only if you have the $$$ to buy the state of the art hardware. While my Linux can run peacfully on a 100Mhz machine without any complaints (i know people who run it on lower end machines too), XP simply sucks when you have a slower system. After all how many people can afford to keep upgrading their hardware just keeping in mind the latest demands of the latest Windows versions.

XP does not detect my Linux partitions while the converse was not true. I dont know if this can be done. Anyone care to explain. I mean, I can access my windows files from Linux but not vice versa. And this sucks for real.

My Linux comes built in with Apache, the webserver, but I could find IIS only on the professional versions. The home version simply did not have it. Microsoft needs to understand that there are normal people who can't afford to pay extra for the Pro version, simply to have IIS.

Remote logging into a windows machine is a pain. I know there are tools like Remote desktop, but the overhead is too much for normal tasks. There are SSH servers available but everyone knows how difficult it is to work on a command prompt with Windows.

XP does not provide me an option to work on multiple terminals like Linux. There are some Power toy tools that are available, but they lack the same punch. Its jsut what they call them, toys. In Linux I can work simultaneouly on upto 16 desktops, all graphical with X.

XP did have the automatic update for patches, and it is fairly effective. But they refuse to divulge the inside information about the patches and you are best left trusting your machine to microsoft.

XP was actually supposed to be a more secure OS, perhaps Microsoft has a different perception of security as far as OSes go. It is still the most vulnerable OS in the market, and it comes with a steep price tag. Maybe if they really cared about stability, they would trust Unix to be their foundation and build their so called crap on top of it, though I am not sure if anyone would be interested in them then. Mac OSX seemed to have learn't but I doubt if we can ever see a windows with a unix base. I wish it would happen some day, that would take care of most of the stability and security issues that plague microsoft products.

As far as tech support is concerned, Microsoft loves to snide at Linux because there is no one place to go to if you have a complaint or a query. The real truth is that Microsoft is no where in the league of IBM as far as support is concerned. Atleast for Linux, you have so many forums where you can pretty much get all your queries solved.

Perhaps Windows thrives because of Office. But with Openoffice improving day by day and is now almost compatible with MSOffice, there is little reason you need to pay for stuff when you can get the same thing for free.

Ofcourse I have mostly pointed out to the flaws in XP. It does have some good features. As far as the ease of use is concerned, I can't find anything else with the exception of Mac which is as easy to use as windows. XP supports a wide array of hardware and it is pretty easy installing new add ons to your computer.

Overall it is a very easy OS to use, though not necessarily better. But if you happen to be casual browser, you really don't care much to know about the many issues which don't make much sense to a average user. If you did, perhaps you would stop and think. Is it worth investing so much just for another ordinary product. Just think about it.

Volkswagon of vengeance

''XP makes perfect sense only when using VI (the editor)''

thanks,

--damo