New Wine, Old Bottle: Windows XP on a K6-2/400 (Almost) Easy Enough for Your Grandmother Eric Grevstad
For the most part, Windows XP installed itself, with a series of progress gauges, automatic reboots, and screens touting cool new functions, much like those you've seen while setting up earlier versions or Windows or other applications. (We were briefly fooled when the final slide, "Thank you for purchasing Windows XP," appeared but then cycled back to the first, "An exciting new look," just like when you arrive at the movies early and have to sit through a looping set of Coke ads and local-merchant slides.)
Techno-novices should note that it wasn't a completely hands-off job, however. Early on, Setup paused for us to hit the Enter key and confirm the default disk partition and use of FAT32 instead of reformatting the hard disk with the slightly more efficient NTFS file system. And about 15 minutes into the process, we were prompted to enter our name, company, area code, and a name for the computer in order to accept a "typical network setup using Client for Microsoft Networks, File and Print Sharing for Microsoft Networks, QoS Packet Scheduler, TCP/IP with auto addressing."
Again, accepting the defaults works fine, but the kids and aunts that Microsoft says can master Win XP easily may be a bit daunted. Ditto for the connection quiz that cable or DSL modem users take to configure their Internet access; many users can simply check "Obtain IP automatically" and "Obtain DNS automatically," but others will have to type in an IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway and DNS. Apparently Win XP isn't clever enough to type WINIPCFG and write down the settings before overwriting Win 98.
After precisely one hour, however, Windows XP was ready to go, or at least to ask, "Ready to activate Windows?" and explain that, "to help reduce software piracy" -- or at least to keep kids and aunts from installing their new OS on a second home PC, since the million-copy Chinese and Indonesian pirate factories have already cracked XP and unprotected CD images are flying around the Internet -- we had to contact Microsoft online or by phone to lock this copy of XP to this computer.
You can put off Product Activation for up to 30 days before the OS shuts down, though you'll be bombarded with pop-up reminders in the interim; either way, considering its insult and inconvenience to legitimate users and hardware upgraders and failure to truly prevent piracy, it's by far the worst feature of Windows XP and one of the worst features ever implemented in software.
By contrast, almost every screen after that brought a smile to our face. XP prompted us to enter our name and up to four others' as system users, each getting his or her own desktop layout, Internet Explorer favorites, and other settings, and then rebooted -- looking familiar enough for instant productivity, yet with the celebrated new "Luna" interface making Windows more colorful, less cluttered, and prettier (if decidedly Mac OS X-like).
We particularly admired the new Tiles and Thumbnail views in My Computer/Windows Explorer and right-click "Pin to Start Menu" option that lets you promote any program to the favorite applications list atop the new Start Menu, with no more having to navigate through program groups to get to it.
