Windows XP - Maintenance - Articles about Computing

Roulette Bill Gates and Company give you all of the hype about all of the wonderful new features in XP. On a new page we're going to look at the program from the eyes of a consultant and from the eyes of a user. There may be some definitive and qualitative differences.

XP on a properly tuned up machine does load much faster than its predecessors, Windows predecessors. On the other hand, if there is a problem with the system then it compensates for that and it loads up actually much slower than its predecessors.

Some of the reasons are as follows:

The software. The software has to be made for Windows XP. In other words, your old software may not work and if it does work it may not work properly and it may slow up the system. Windows XP does work differently and the older software, meaning software that was built for previous versions of Windows may struggle before it can actually perform its work. This will result in a pause and sometimes result in actually locking up the computer.

Of course, Bill Gates would love to have you buy all new software, especially their own software for Windows. That means getting a new Office at hundreds of dollars. You may decide that it's worth it but Bill Gates doesn't let you make the decision. You don't have a choice.

Drivers. Drivers are little programs that help your full blown program work with the different parts of the system and they are also the little programs that explain to the computer how to run, how to make the mouse work, the monitor, the sound system and so on.

Your old drivers are not always giong to work. As a matter of fact there's an excellent chance that they won't work. In some cases you'll be able to download new drivers from the manufacturer. In other cases, depending on the manufacturer you won't be able to.

Worse yet, if you try to see if a driver works and it doesn't you will want to put in the newer driver. The new driver sometimes has trouble getting installed over the old driver. Thanks, guys. So remove the old driver. You can do the regular procedure for removing the driver but the system usually remembers that old driver so it sometimes has difficulty installing the newer driver.

The work around? Set back the system to a previous good working situation and then try to install the driver and that may help. Otherwise you may have to check the regular registry which is way beyond the scope of this article.

Windows XP

You might want to install certain new programs from Windows XP Office and use some of the older ones as well. For example, you might not want to get Office XP Pro so you will want to use the Access database program from Windows 2000 which you have and install the others as Windows XP programs.

It may be a struggle to install this properly. I would suggest that you install the older program and then the newer one.

If you have a multilingual system, such as Hebrew and English, and you want to have the programs take advantage of the English interface you may be disappointed with the older programs. It seems that the new English interface program conflicts with the older English interface program, which means that your older program might not be able to show up in English except with a great deal of tweaking. You will probably decide that it's better to just leave it in the secondary language such as Hebrew.

Outlook Explorer. On some machines which run too fast for Internet Explorer you will find an interesting phenomenon. You will load up one website and then when you try to click on a link you will not be able to work on the first website that you loaded up. The clicks will have a bouncy feeling and the other program simply will not load up.

The work around?

Click on the name of the first website on the task bar below. Then you'll be able to work on it again. It needs a little bit of TLC, that's tender loving care, each time that you want to do something with it. It needs an extra step.

The alternative is just wait and after a little bit of time the first website will work again, as it should. It's a bit of a nuisance and it does not occur in every machine. It works noticeably more frequently in faster machines than slower machines, but that does not seem to be the only cause of it. This is a bug in Internet Explorer 6.0.

Does this mean that I am recommending that you do not upgrade to Windows XP?

Not at all. It does meant hat you might want to take a chance and download some of the service packs, although service packs too is buggy. It does not necessarily mean that you should stay with older versions of Windows. They have their bugs and XP has its bugs.

The price, the new software that comes out from now on works more effectively on Windows XP so you might want to consider the following:

If you're buying a new computer, take the plunge and buy Windows XP.

If you have an older computer that is working with the previous version of Windows, then you might want to remain with that program until you upgrade your entire system. Then you can get the version of Windows that is available at that time.

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