New Wine, Old Bottle: Windows XP on a K6-2/400 Fast Enough for You? Eric Grevstad
The cleaner, two-column Start Menu does take a little getting used to -- bold entries for Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and your "pinned" programs above a number (you decide how many) of recently or frequently used applications plus a menu item for "All Programs" on the left, with the slightly redundant My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, and My Computer above Control Panel and Help, Search, and Run tools on the right.
But everything is customizable, including a switch back to Win 98/Me's "Classic" interface, and the cleaner Taskbar -- which turns multiple instances of a program into single submenus and hides the jumble of icons that most utilities stuff into the system tray -- was a pleasure.
The only unpleasant surprise was that when we clicked on All Programs, it listed only Win XP's own Accessories, Communications, Entertainment, and System Tools; all the applications on our former Start Menu were no longer listed. We were able to launch the simpler ones (and add them to the new Start Menu) by using Explorer to open the Program Files folder, but others such as Microsoft Word no longer worked after XP's thorough remodeling of the disk and folder structure ("This application must be installed to run. Please run Setup from the location where you originally installed the application"), nor did they appear on Control Panel's Add/Remove Programs list.
Clearly -- as, to be fair, is true when installing any operating system -- the wisest course is not only to choose a "New" installation, but to go ahead and let XP start from scratch and reformat your PC's hard disk, then reinstall your other software later. On a brighter note, since we told XP to overwrite the old Windows installation, Microsoft's 1.5GB disk space requirement was a fib -- the Compaq had only 600MB less storage space than it had before the installation.
The Joke's On Us
Finally, for the best news: We expected Windows XP to bring the old Presario to its knees, but it seemed to give it a new lease on life.
The LS-120 drive not only worked, but formatted disks while we used our favorite image editor (Jasc Software's Paint Shop Pro) and listened to an audio CD via Windows Media Player. Loading and switching among a dozen applications didn't faze or crash the system, or even seem to require as much hard-disk thrashing as working with four or five apps had under Windows 98.
Nor did playing the supplied Space Cadet Pinball during audio CD listening, with both CD and sound-effect audio streams being fed to the speakers simultaneously. And while nothing exactly sizzled, applications launched and windows and dialog boxes popped open and shut with no waiting -- less waiting, in fact, than we experienced testing a Win Me home PC with a 900MHz AMD Duron CPU (and a lame integrated video chipset) a few months ago.
Windows XP didn't quite live up to its billing as radically faster for bootup and shutdown -- a cold start (from turning on the PC to being ready for work) took roughly 53 seconds, versus the 58 it had taken with Win 98, and shutdown time actually increased from 6 seconds to 14. But if you use XP's much-enhanced hibernation and user-switching functions, you can save considerable time: The Presario went to sleep (saving the system state to the hard disk) in just 10 seconds and woke up in just 30, and switching from one user (leaving several applications open) to another took just 6 to 8 seconds.
Overall, the pairing of Microsoft's new Windows with a not-so-new PC worked a lot better than we'd expected. Of course we'd have liked more CPU speed, but if a 400MHz K6-2 can motor along, we think virtually any Pentium III or Athlon CPU at the same or higher clock speed should be fine. And 128MB is indeed adequate memory, although experience with Win 2000 makes us quick to urge more, particularly to make the most of user switching. The wild cards will be peripheral drivers for things like economy PCs' "Winmodems" or special-button keyboards, and you'd best check with your PC vendor about those (though we suspect major components like the former are more likely to see patches than frills like the latter).
WinPlanet will have much more on Windows XP's interface, performance, compatibility, and tweaking potential in future articles, but this first hardware torture test left us impressed. If you're already running Windows 2000, the upgrade's not essential, but if you're using Win 98 or Me, Win XP is the real deal.
