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- Microsoft's marketing campaign is a bit misleading; you can't play DVD movies without purchasing a third-party decoder first. And while MP3s can be played out of the box, ripping music into this audio format is possible only through (again) third-party software. I'll be going with Cyberlink, as I've always liked their products.
- Even with XP's built-in Internet Connection Firewall features, Gnomies are still recommending Tiny Personal Firewall (freeware). Ian Lepko added: "When I enabled it and went to Steve Gibson's site, it passed every one of the tests perfectly!"
- Most of you have heard about the automatic grouping of open applications in the Taskbar (when you have several instances running, Windows will put them under the same Taskbar button). However, here's something else I discovered: open Internet Explorer, then Notepad, then Internet Explorer again. Look at that! It puts the same apps next to each other, no matter the order in which they were opened.
- Someone at Microsoft forgot to update the individual Administrative Tools and Offline Web Pages folder icons, They still be ugly. Under the "Customize" tab of the folder properties dialog, you can assign a different icon for each and every folder. Sweet!
- The Windows help system has a wealth of new features. In one swoop, you can perform queries against the local database as well as the Microsoft Knowledge Base. Nice! Although, I don't think the MSKB integration is working yet. For one, it doesn't return any results on basic terms. Plus, it defaults to searching for Windows 2000 specific issues. Anyway, click the last icon in the toolbar (the document with a red checkmark in it). Tweak away!
- The OS only comes with three Visual Styles - which are lame to begin with. The Plus! site may have more available in time, but who really knows? At least the folks at Stardock are offering an integrated version of WindowBlinds, which apparently runs more efficiently than Microsoft's code.
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