May 02, 2001 05:16 PM
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An American, Japanese and Santa Singh from India appear for an interview for the highest post in Microsoft. Mr. Gates himself poses them a single question that will decide their fate. “How do we switch from Windows 9x to Windows 0x?”. American says “Make it more user friendly”. “Get out”, screams Gates. Japanese gets out too with his reply, “Add more device drivers”. Santa says, “Just rename Windows 98 to Windows 2001”. He gets the job.
Enough of MS jokes. Critics will have a new playground with the launch of Windows XP by this July. Frankly Windows has revolutionized the world with the unique GUI interface and user friendliness, which is prime reason I never liked Dos, Unix and Linux. Though Windows ME, an intermediate release between Windows 98 and Windows XP, was unnecessary OS that offered very less features to be called an upgrade, Windows XP promises to be effectively called a “new version”. Firstly the name is also unique replacing the “year” with “XP”.
But for what is in store, just check on the features proposed:
Personalized Welcome Screen and Fast User Switching. If more than one person use your home PC, they can easily set up individual accounts either during setup or from control panel and can have different system settings, desktop settings, welcome screen. But what is unique is different users can easily switch from one account to other without closing their applications (without logging off).
Start Menu. Presently I have too many applications on my PC and opening the Start Menu-Programs blocks half my screen and plus it is difficult to locate the application. Also I have to scroll down since alphabetically Word is second last in the big list. Window XP will list frequently used files and applications together for quick and easy access, besides having easy access to Outlook and IE etc. If you have used Word 2000 then you are familiar to this feature, which is reflected in its menus. The dynamic menus will also be context sensitive.
Better file/folder Management. From File Manager to Explorer was an efficient jump, but Windows XP promises even better file management and enhancement to Explorer. The files can be arranged as what make sense to user and thumbnail previews of documents will be present on left side with a menu that allows copying, moving, saving, deleting and such file handling commands.
Search Companion. It provides classification like searching for pictures, video files etc or documents, spreadsheets etc, or all files. Whether you are searching for people or computers over home network. It is made more efficient as it can be used to search for information over the internet. Help and support center can also be contacted.
Image Handling. This sounds like features are inherited from ACDSee software. The My Pictures folder will provide you several ways to view pictures, and pictures can be shared with friends and family via e-mail. It also allows publishing your favorite pictures on the Web or order prints directly from the Internet. The OS will ship with photo printing wizard that allows selection of printer, paper and layout, thus promising to improve print quality and eliminate paper wastage. Then again a web publishing wizard allows posting of pictures, video clips etc on web.
Windows Media Player 8. I have described WMP7 in another article. This one serves to improve over the disadvantages of earlier version. It is the first media player with full-featured DVD support with integrated full-screen video controls that will fade in and out with a single click. It allows CD burning at 700% more speed, downloading songs to portable players besides playback of videos and MP3 and effective organization of music files and libraries. But what is unique is that the player will be integral part of OS, thus enabling music handling from explorer too.
Networking and Internet. Like ME, XP allows usage of different PCs at home to be connected in a network and share common deices like printers etc. The Internet can be shared too over a single dial-up connection but XP offers a new option lets the user disconnect your dial-up connection to use your phone line and easily resume the connection again.
Internet Explorer 6. It offers a personal bar like NeoPlanet’s “Channels” that will provide easy access to stocks, weather, news etc. Search offer, enhanced security and support for DHTML, XML, JavaScript, VBScript and such technologies. The media player will allow listening to Web radio stations while surfing the net without need to open a new window. Best part is that images will be resized to fit the window automatically and single click saving, printing of images from Web pages. It also offers firewall security and new security feature under development by W3C consortium. Instant messaging, file sharing, emails are other such features. Oh yes, If IE6 fails an error reporting from will appear so that error will be reported to Microsoft support center. This is already present and copied from Netscape6.
System Restore. In the event of a problem, lets you restore your computer to a previous state without losing personal data files. System Restore actively monitors system file changes, and lets you restore versions that existed before the changes. Now this is already present in Windows ME and is definitely a savior. And for those who are pleased with Windows 2000 that has revolutionized networking and is well appreciated for its stability, Windows XP is built around the same Windows engine. So we can expect more stability and lesser “blue screens”.
So I am sitting with fingers all crossed and hoping that Microsoft silences critics with a more better, reliable OS for home computing and also sticks to its promised release by July. Oh the wait…
