Windows XP may get another reprieve

[Doreen L.]

There's hope yet for those of us who prefer XP over Vista.

http://www.news.com/8301-13860_3-9902747-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

[Steve Grisetti]

I still think Vista is underrated and undeserving of all the bad press it's getting -- especially once you turn off the Aero interface.

The release of SP1 (already available if you go to Windows Update and which will be an automatic update in the next couple of weeks) should make it a much more solid platform.

Although XP is certainly a high water mark that will be tough to top!

(Meantime, forgotten in all of this is that Apple went through the same growing pains with OSX which, in addition to being released with lots of instabilities, was incompatible with virtually all the software that had been created for Mac System 9 -- and many vendors were, for the first year, offering to retrograde new systems to OS9. And those of us who use Adobe's CS3 know well the problems with Leopard.) (Not that that makes the release of any less-than-ready product acceptable.)

[Andy_E]

I find it kinda odd that they were talking about killing it off in June just as they are about to release SP3 (due back half of next month apparently).

[Bob]

It wasn't just Apple and OSX that had the same growing pains. I remember going through the same types of incompatibilities and instabilities going from Windows 3 to Windows95 to Windows98 and to Windows XP. Windows XP, especially, broke a lot of applications and swamped the hardware of the day. That's all forgotten and forgiven now. It will most likely be the same story with Vista.

I took the plunge and installed Vista on my system a few weeks ago. I installed it on a new internal disk drive so I could keep my original Windows XP system disk intact and boot between either OS as desired. It's worked out rather well so far. I haven't installed SP1 yet, but Vista already has been very stable. I'll keep XP around a while longer as I still have a few applications that are not yet compatible. But, I don't use them that often and I find that I seldom need to boot into XP. I agree with Steve, Vista doesn't deserve the bad press it's been getting.

I'd always realized that I would have to move to Vista at some point. And, since I build my own systems, I did my homework and made sure the hardware and firmware components were compatible and adequate. I also waited until all the necessary drivers had a Vista version and there were Vista compatible versions of my most used software applications. When my final criteria, the availability of SP1, became available, I decided it was time to give it a test drive.

[Andy_E]

Of all the Windows versions I've used, Windows 95 is the only one I was an early adopter on. In fact, I installed the beta and it was pretty stable. All the rest I waited for either a point release (Windows 3.1) an update (98SE) or a service pack (2 service packs in the case of Windows 2000). I've no burning desire to upgrade my current boxes to Vista - it will give me nothing extra for those. However, for my next hardware purchase I'm intrigued with the idea of being able to run with enough RAM to bin the pagefile - something I wouldn't comtemplate with XP.

[Ken Jarstad]

A friend from church asked me to check out her new PC with Vista. She had her old system backed up to an external USB HDD but couldn't get the new Vista system to recognize the USB drive. I found that Vista was indeed finding the USB drive and assigning a driver for it but never added the drive letter to the drive table - couldn't access it! I checked Google and found multitudes of people were experiencing similar problems with flash drives and such. I think SP1 will fix it - and fortunately she is content to wait until the system updates.

[Chuck Engels]

Ken, XP does the same thing many times depending on different variables.

You just need to go into Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management and assign a drive letter or change the one it defaulted to.

[Ken Jarstad]

Never heard of that happening in XP, Chuck. I didn't know you could go to Admin Tools and fix it. This was a couple of weeks ago, so if I remember right I did check Disk Management and found it not listed. None of the people I found on Google looking for a solution on Vista were given that as a solution.

[VernonRobinson]

Ken,
I would have to agree with Chuck. I have to do it quite regularly on my work machine. I don't know why. But everytime I plug a thumb drive in it is a crap-shoot as to whether Windows XP will assign it a drive letter. Sometimes I think it does not know which letters are already assigned since there are drives mapped periodically from F to Z.

-Vernon

[Ken Jarstad]

Wow! Thanks guys. You know that behavior is *lame* though. I would find it a little beyond annoying - unacceptable. Needs to be fixed.