XP Professional: Not as bad as I expected, but still VERY primitive

After a week of using XP Pro at my newest client's place of business, I
have to be honest and say that I was wrong. XP is nowhere near as
unusable as my previous brief encounters with it had led me to believe.
It is, in fact, very usable. It is also, compared to OSX, very
primitive. There are too many steps to go through to get at most things,
there are way to many "nannies" in the form of warning boxes,
unnnecessary (and unwanted, I might add) pop-ups and dialogs and
seemingly there's a "Wizard" for everything. I realize that this is the
way that Windows matured, but honestly, isn't it time for MS to take
another tack?

Things like screen capture (needed to write product mamuals) are low
resolution and look terrible compared to those from the Mac. Not only
that but XP doesn't seem to offer the screen capture options (like drag
-and-capture) that the Mac offers. When making PDFs, XP can't handle
PostScript in PDFs without Acrobat Distiller and a PostScript printer
driver. (third party solutions like CutePDF or PDF995 while offering a
fast print-to-PDF solution, do not parse placed PS images at all).

I also find networking STILL unnecessirily complex and hard to set-up.
There is a seemingly endless merry-go-round of set-up windows which if
followed take you round and round and round the same set of windows over
and over. I kept hoping that one of them would yield a brass ring, but
no such luck. Sure, I have everything working, and XP switches
seamlessly between my home Wi-Fi network and the office Ethernet network
which I found surprising and of course, very good. I've already said
that SAMBA on XP Pro works marvelously, and I have no complaints there.
I can talk to the other computers on my home network without a hitch.

The Dell Latitude D510 seems to have a 1.5 Gig Celeron M in it (if I am
to believe Dell's website - and I have no reason not to) yet it seems
sluggish compared to my 1 Gig G4 PowerBook and definitly slow nest to me
G5 tower. It boots slower also, taking close to two minutes to reach
desktop, vs less than a minute for my PowerBook and only about 30
seconds for my G5. BUT, I love the keyboard on the Dell - APPLE are you
listening? While the Dell is reasonably well built, it is definitely
cheaper looking than my PowerBook. I've already mentioned the track pad
which is no better than any other I've tried, but I'm impressed with the
Latitude's I/O. It has Firewire (albeit via the little tiny camcorder
connector), FOUR USB ports. Microphone, headphone, built-in modem,
buit-in Ether, Parallel and serial ports as well as VGA and S-Video. It
comes with a PCMCIA slot (and a Wi-Fi card in that slot) as well as IR
and a DVD burner. Very impressive. If I could put OSX on it, it would be
an almost perfect laptop (might run faster too).

Just my two cents and an apology to the Windows users here for many of
my comments about Windows. I still think OSX is MUCH better, but XP is
hardly the garbage that Win98/SE/ME/W2K was or that I thought XP to
still be.

--
George Graves
The health of our society is a direct result of the men
and women we choose to admire.
.

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