Well, I just installed a beta of XP the other day and thought I would come here to look for some experiences other people have been having. Oddly enough when I looked, all I saw was people arguing about how MS sucks and threads going off topic about digital music formats...
The purpose of THIS THREAD is to post the experience you have had with XP. If you don't use XP, or you think XP sucks, or whatever, just go away, you aren't needed. It would also be useful to some people to post what OS you are coming from prior to XP, and some system specs. Now for my impressions...
I'm coming from a 6 month install of 98 SE and thought I'd try out Xp. I have a 1 gig tbird, 256 mb ram, 60 gig hd, geforce 2 gts, and sblive value. I'm dual booting just in case it sucked or screwed stuff up. Well, I can say it hasn't. I have build 2464 or something. After partitioning off a couple gigs for XP, I went to install. All I can say is this is the EASIEST install I've ever had. Booting off the cd it formatted for me, and then installed windows. It didn't ask me for a single driver as it installed. This is good and bad as I'll address in a second. Everything was going good, except with 4 minutes to go it froze up and I had to reboot. Instead of recovering it started over completely. The second time though it installed fine. Now on my screen I saw Xp running...
First lets talk about drivers and compatability. When you look at the drivers running they're all from Microsoft. I only care about drivers for a few things, mainly my geforce 2 gts and sblive, and they both had drivers with microsofts name on them, so not sure what they were really using. Well, I went out to nvidia and creative and got their 2000 drivers and installed them without a problem. Of course xp complains about them not being "signed" my microsoft or whatever, but I'm sure these major companies will address this once it is really out. Doesn't matter anyways...
First thing I dead was right click on the task bar and get my quick launch bar. Have to have my show desktop button. Then I started playing with the visual look. Many people have complained about the new look, but let me say you can set it to a classic windows, and you can adjust almost EVERYTHING you see. Here are some examples: desktop icon size, color schemes of course, the size of the title bars of windows, the size of the minimize, maximize, and close buttons, the scroll bar size, shadows for the mouse and desktop items, and the list just goes on. The start button has a new interface, but of course you can pick the classic look from the old windows, which I did. The only thing you can't change which I wish you could is the start button. Why green?
Ok, now some gaming experience. I've tested counter-strike and quake 3. First of all neither of these games run great with vsync off. I'm not sure why. I've heard there is a refresh rate problem similar to one in 2k which a fix came out for, but no fix for XP yet. So I ran both of these with vsync on. Counter-strike ran fine, but quake 3 wasn't as good as on 98. Just not as smooth. I was too lazy look at fps, I forgot the console command.
My final comment is about some of the networking options. I have two computers in my house and just run a simple network for file and print sharing, and to share a cable modem. Previously we had used SyGate to network them. It was annoying and would die after long up times for no reason. I found internet connection sharing on 98 to suck for the most part. Well, Xp is amazing. Through the wizard it setup my computer, then it made a disk for me to run in the other computer. I go to that computer, run it, and like magic they are now networked and sharing internet at great speeds. I don't know if this was available in 2k or not, but all I can say is cool.
Well, those are my comments. Would love to hear what you guys think of it from YOUR EXPERIENCE. Especially gaming stuff. I never went to NT or 2k for the sake of gaming on 98, but I'm hoping XP can change that. Sorry this was so long, just too much to say!
Nate
The purpose of THIS THREAD is to post the experience you have had with XP. If you don't use XP, or you think XP sucks, or whatever, just go away, you aren't needed. It would also be useful to some people to post what OS you are coming from prior to XP, and some system specs. Now for my impressions...
I'm coming from a 6 month install of 98 SE and thought I'd try out Xp. I have a 1 gig tbird, 256 mb ram, 60 gig hd, geforce 2 gts, and sblive value. I'm dual booting just in case it sucked or screwed stuff up. Well, I can say it hasn't. I have build 2464 or something. After partitioning off a couple gigs for XP, I went to install. All I can say is this is the EASIEST install I've ever had. Booting off the cd it formatted for me, and then installed windows. It didn't ask me for a single driver as it installed. This is good and bad as I'll address in a second. Everything was going good, except with 4 minutes to go it froze up and I had to reboot. Instead of recovering it started over completely. The second time though it installed fine. Now on my screen I saw Xp running...
First lets talk about drivers and compatability. When you look at the drivers running they're all from Microsoft. I only care about drivers for a few things, mainly my geforce 2 gts and sblive, and they both had drivers with microsofts name on them, so not sure what they were really using. Well, I went out to nvidia and creative and got their 2000 drivers and installed them without a problem. Of course xp complains about them not being "signed" my microsoft or whatever, but I'm sure these major companies will address this once it is really out. Doesn't matter anyways...
First thing I dead was right click on the task bar and get my quick launch bar. Have to have my show desktop button. Then I started playing with the visual look. Many people have complained about the new look, but let me say you can set it to a classic windows, and you can adjust almost EVERYTHING you see. Here are some examples: desktop icon size, color schemes of course, the size of the title bars of windows, the size of the minimize, maximize, and close buttons, the scroll bar size, shadows for the mouse and desktop items, and the list just goes on. The start button has a new interface, but of course you can pick the classic look from the old windows, which I did. The only thing you can't change which I wish you could is the start button. Why green?
Ok, now some gaming experience. I've tested counter-strike and quake 3. First of all neither of these games run great with vsync off. I'm not sure why. I've heard there is a refresh rate problem similar to one in 2k which a fix came out for, but no fix for XP yet. So I ran both of these with vsync on. Counter-strike ran fine, but quake 3 wasn't as good as on 98. Just not as smooth. I was too lazy look at fps, I forgot the console command.
My final comment is about some of the networking options. I have two computers in my house and just run a simple network for file and print sharing, and to share a cable modem. Previously we had used SyGate to network them. It was annoying and would die after long up times for no reason. I found internet connection sharing on 98 to suck for the most part. Well, Xp is amazing. Through the wizard it setup my computer, then it made a disk for me to run in the other computer. I go to that computer, run it, and like magic they are now networked and sharing internet at great speeds. I don't know if this was available in 2k or not, but all I can say is cool.
Well, those are my comments. Would love to hear what you guys think of it from YOUR EXPERIENCE. Especially gaming stuff. I never went to NT or 2k for the sake of gaming on 98, but I'm hoping XP can change that. Sorry this was so long, just too much to say!
Nate