An XPerience to avoid
It was claimed that this one would be failsafe. It wouldn't crash. It would learn from its mistakes. It would be supremely suited to the Internet, interacting with it at every stage to optimise your computing experience. Windows XP would be far better than anything that had ever come before.
So, you can understand my excitement when I got a preview copy of the aforementioned program back in August. Finally, something that wouldn't delete half of the information through crashing at random intervals, something that would do what it's supposed to and something that'll do it effectively. So it'll be really clever and all. Exciting, huh?
Well, no. I installed it. That took ages, consumed vast amounts of my hard drive space and even then seemed to be an outer shell of a program. Whenever I actually tried to do something with it, it said something like "download this from our marvellous website"? Whenever I answered "Yes", it would produce a little window that would say something like "download time: 467 years". Which was not ideal, at all. I mean, fair enough, I only had a crap modem at home, it would take less time on the University network, but a lot of people have similar connections to myself, and they would have presumably found the experience as boring and pointless as I did.
This is probably a good time to air my views on Microsoft. I have nothing against them, at all. I am all for people getting away with bending the rules of the market as far as they'll go, and if someone does it successfully and gets away with it, becoming the richest man in the world in the meantime, all power to them.
I do, however, object to shit programs that do not work. I hate Netscape, I am a fan of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. I am not a fan of Windows XP, if nothing else, because it crashed within 20 minutes. To be fair to it though, it did claim to connect to the Internet to report the problem. Oh good, I thought. I'd heard about this: it is meant to connect, tell the Mighty Microsoft what went wrong, and then someone there creates a "patch" that repairs the flaw and sends it back to me. Pretty clever, huh?
Little did I know it made no difference whatsoever. The computer proceeded to crash at the same point several times in the future. The touted Internet connectibility (XP actually stands for experience) was crap. It didn't give me anything I didn't have before. They'd redone the graphics a bit - new icons, that sort of stuff. Mildly exciting for the first time you see them, completely pointless otherwise.
They've also rearranged the way that the open windows are organised: they're now all grouped at the bottom screen by type, so all of the Explorer windows are grouped together under one icon, you have to click on it and then you can choose which one you want. Sounds like an OK idea, but is actually damn annoying if you're chatting to two people at the same time and trying to switch between the two.
So, so far it's gobbled up huge amounts of space, not increased the functionality of my computer very much at all, and made it slightly prettier. Not quite what was promised, now is it?
The big idea for Windows XP was to combine the usability of Windows 98 and the non-crashability of Windows NT into one big, infallible program. It seems to have failed on all counts, so much so that I've already uninstalled it, despite being legally able to have it on my computer for another 6 months. It's shit people. Please, don't buy it. Donate the money to a tramp, purchase 2 tonnes of grass clippings or insert the money into a shredder. All three are much better ways of spending it. Windows XP is a complete failure.
18th Oct 2001