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My desktop OS: WindowsXP SP2I've been looking at the «My desktop OS» -articles, and found that I'll have to be the one writing one for Windows XP.To be honest, Window XP is very close to being usable on the desktop. I say very close, because it's not so out of the box. There is a few issues, however and many of them arises when you need to reinstall. You do need to reinstall Windows from time to time - it's just a fact of life! Disclaimer: I only link to applications that can be downloaded free of charge in this article. They do have licences though, so read them when installing! Installing it.Driver problemsThis is an annoying problem. I've got a Dell 600, and I warn you! Do not loose the driver CD. You're lost without it! Dell buys parts from many places and create a CD for reinstalling them when you need to reinstall the PC. Without the CD, you have to use another machine or another operating system to download the files from Internet. Any Linux-live-cd will do the trick, if you don't have another PC handy, or you could use BartPE, that is capable of booting Windows from a CD, but might be a tad difficult to set up. Save the files to a USB memory stick. Windows XP have good support for that kind of devices. Beware! There are licensing issues with creating a BartPE CD, so be sure to read all licensing information before you do it. Even if you do have the driver CD, do not point to it from device manager, installing the drivers (as you normally would). The installer on the CD is the way to get it done as easily as possible. It installs an Icon on your Windows menu that you use to install the drivers. You will be asked to reboot repeatedly during the install process. Security Windows isn't secure in any way out of the box, not even XP SP2, so running Windows Update early after setup and then often afterwards is important. There is rumors that their next OS, Vista is going to be quite secure, but for some reason I don't trust Microsoft when they're saying things like that - they don't have the best merits. You need the following (I also put in a link to my selection of the application in question):
Windows is not an have never been very usable out of the box. There is a lot of helper applications, but they are crude and limited, like notepad, that do not support plugins, color coding (also called syntax highlighting), or huge files. There is also no support for PDF printing/exporting and the PrintScreen doesn't work well, either. The version of Java that comes with Windows also need imidiate upgrade to something usable. Here is my selection to make the machine usable:
Productivity apps. As I've allready said, you cannot be very productive with a bare Windows install - never could be. While the system itself is quite usable, after doing all mentioned above, it still doesn't have any productivity apps, and I think you need an Office suite, ability to burn CDs (at least) and the codecs needed to watch most movies. You also need an application to handle images. I mean, that's a minimum! There is no word processor or any office applications other than Wordpad that's actually quite usable if all you'll ever write are some letters, and you never recieve any documents from others. If you do, you'll have to install readers for the files you need to read. You can find usable readers at Microsofts site. Worpad does not support tables an a lot of other stuff you might need, like columns.
Now, that's it, really! You do now have a fully usable computer at the cost of nothing but the computer itself and the Windows licence! It's a lot of work, and it takes time, but afterwards you've got a OK desktop PC. Using it.Using Windows XP can at times be a strange experience. Since it is target for so many viruses and such, a lot of the programs as well as Windows itself has automatic update features. That is a good thing, since they get any security holes patched. But it can be quite annoying. Each of the updates work independently. And you will often have to reboot after the update.Now, I know it makes my computer safer, but do I really have to reboot my computer every other day - even if I'm writing an important document at the time? Windows have a quite usable security profile, with normal users unable to break the system beyond their own files. The problem is however, that a lot of programs written for Windows are old, updated applications from way back when security wasn't much of an issue. They need write access to parts of the harddisks that a normal user cannot access. The applications do not tell the operator which files it is and as a result, it's close to impossible to run a Windows computer if you are not an administrator of the system. You are usually not even able to run Windows Update as a regular user, not to mention the other updaters! Being an administrator at all times is only possible if you know what you are doing. Still, even inexperienced Windows users allmost allways run as Administrator. Applications runs smoothly, but the OS itself seem to lag from time to time - or maybe it's the desktop app, explorer? I upgraded from 512MB to 1280MB RAM, thinking it was a memory problem, but no. It still happens - not that often, so a RAM update helped, but the lag's still there from time to time. ConclusionWindows XP can be a good operating system for the desktop, provided the user is properly trained. If not, the machine tends to get filled with keyloggers, viruses, malware and spyware. The removal of such is sometimes not trivial.With a reasonably well trained operator, Windows XP is a safe, inexpensive (if not free like some Linuxdistros) operating system. With an untrained user, it is a trap for viruses and malware. Other OSesI dual boot with Linux, Ubuntu Linux. I used 45 minutes to install it, all in all. And it's safer to run than Windows - it's way easier to run as normal user, since you can use 'sudo' to do administrative tasks. viruses hardly exist for Linux, and malware/keyloggers and such won't run! They're all written for Windows.I've written two articles about my Ubuntu experiences. There I also explain how I got MP3s and a lot of other stuff to work in Ubuntu without any hazzle. If you want to have look, you can find them here: ./nalle. |
Newsflash!
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