A New Windows to the Cyberworld

Jim Lipman

TechOnline (10/25/2001 12:00 AM ET)

On October 25, Microsoft launches a new version of the company's Windows operating system—Windows XP. Although the coming-out party for the latest Windows OS appears to be more subdued than those for some of its predecessors, nevertheless Microsoft is spending a lot of money on product promotion.

The latest Windows comes in three flavors—XP, XP Professional, and XP Home Editions. The different versions target consumer and business desktop users, users connected to servers, users of business applications pervasive through entire companies, and people using high-power workstations. Along with the expected 32-bit OS, Microsoft has a 64-bit version for computers with Intel's Itanium 64-bit processor. Furthermore, the differences between the Home and Professional versions of XP are not as extensive as you might expect—the Home edition is basically the Professional edition with several features disabled.

Notable features of Windows XP include:

• Better performance during boot, recovery from power-down modes, and in loading and using applications
• Improved networking
• A better user interface—Luna—that is more intuitive than its predecessor for using the control panel and the task bar
• An improved Help system
• Wizards to assist in set-up, configuration, and management of the system
• An OS for 64-bit processor-based platforms.

Microsoft is particularly proud of the performance enhancement of XP over Windows 2000 and Windows ME. The company recommends 128 Mbytes of memory (which is pretty easy to come by nowadays), particularly for memory-intensive applications such as multimedia. However, Microsoft also states that XP will run well with 64 Mbytes if you're running less memory intensive tasks such as Web browsing, email, and some office productivity applications.

Minimum recommended compute engine is a 300 MHz Pentium II-class processor, although Microsoft indicates that the system benefits from faster hardware. Furthermore, XP (and, in particular, the Windows XP user interface) performance may be limited by the quality of the video subsystem and video drivers. Large on-board video memory eases the processing load on system memory and applications. Some third-party drivers can also limit XP performance, according to Microsoft, which is working with driver suppliers to minimize this problem.

Enhancements in XP over its Windows predecessors result in faster boot-up and recovery from low-power mode operations, as well as faster running of applications. Benchmarks covering a variety of types of applications—web browsing, office productivity, multimedia, document/multimedia content, and games—show that launching and running applications have improved by 50% or more. Much of this improvement is due to XP's enhanced resource management of memory, CPU, and I/O. For example, XP performs system activities such as optimizing the layout of files and directories on the hard drive and service cleanup during idle times. XP also tracks memory in use during an application and optimizes the amount of virtual memory on-disk for that application, thus minimizing I/O tasks to and from the disk (and the time the system needs to do these tasks). During loading of the XP operating system and applications to run on XP, the OS pre-fetches necessary files into memory during initialization of other devices—this also leads to reduced boot and application-launch times.

An application compatibility feature lets you run pre-XP Windows applications on XP. However, non-XP software relying on specific drivers or low-level operating systems need new drivers or software updates to work with XP. Examples of such software are disk-partitioning utilities and virus-protection programs.

The decision to upgrade to Windows XP is a complex one, based on existing and anticipated OS requirements and the resources you have to move to a new version of Windows. For more information on XP, check out www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/.