Customer Reviews

Microsoft Windows XP Professional Upgrade [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(83)
4 star:		(39)
3 star:		(26)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(36)

 

 

The Upgrade version of Windows XP Professional is fast, feature-rich, and has a fine interface. It is crash-resistant; does not hang during shut-down, and supports dual processors. It boasts of good networking options, as well as built-in Firewall internet security; yet, its value-for-money is suspect.
Installation is time-consuming: budget one hundred minutes for it. Like the Office XP before it, there are activation woes: the money you paid notwithstanding, Microsoft dictates how and where you will use it. Again, bear in mind that Windows XP may compel you to spend more on updating other applications that would not run on it. There is also, this voracious demand on hardware: your PC must conform to at least 128MB of RAM, 1.5GB of free hard-disk space, and 300MHz of clock speed in order to do a decent job. Gambling on anything with lower statistics may backfire.
In a nutshell, upgrading to XP may not worth the financial hassles, unless you're running Windows 98 or earlier model; and wouldn't mind replacing older software that this new Operating System may shun.

I upgraded to Win XP Pro from Win ME. Yes, XP is more stable and usable. But, and this is a big one, be prepared to carefully look at your existing programs. Norton Antivirus 2001 will not work with XP and the 2003 Upgrade has problems; I spent 3 days making it work. Office 2000 has several problems and the best I can get from the admittedly flustered folks in Redmon is "we don't have a fix for that."

So, my...upgrade has now cost me the price of Norton and, probably, the price of Office XP.

I installed this over Windows ME because I bought Visual Basic.NET and it was required to make it run.
It installed fine, but be prepared for it to take several hours to install. It does not however require you to interact much. The install is very automatic.
You can change the look and feel back to Windows 98, like I did. This took a bit of hunting to find all the parts but it does work.
I have seen other comments about software and hardware problems, so let me address them: I would tend to agree that if you have a machine that is four or five years old you would be better off buying a new one than installing this. The biggest warning: If all your software and hardware is very old, this will not work.
You must have drivers and software that are compatible. Some NT/2000 stuff will work. If you have OEM installed software, it probably will not work. I had to replace my virus software and CD-Burner software. (I chose Norton antivirus and Burn and Go by IOMEGA, priced right and installed fine.)
On the plus side the install has one great feature. You can run a test first to see what will be incompatible with the new OS, and get what you need.(You should have PLENTY of time to run to the store while it installs!!) I suggest uninstalling incompatible items before you do the install, as the uninstall may not work later. I had this happen with McAffee antivirus.
Also it insisted that all my USB peripherals be conected and turned on for the install.
I also installed Service Pack 1 from the internet. This took about 5 hours to download and another hour plus to install, so be forewarned. Be prepared to spend MANY hours fine tuning your system.
Otherwise works OK. It did hang once when I had a CD miss-aligned in the drive. Otherwise no real problems.
The only thing I do not like is having to log-in at power-up. I am the only user.

Windows XP Pro is quite arguably the most reliable operating system that Microsoft has come out with yet. Additionally it comes with the option of converting it to a Windows 98SE desktop appearance, for those who don't want to fuss with learning new instructions to get the old things done. It does so much more though.
One note of caution; do not install XP in an older machine, with older hardware. Your sound card vendor may have stopped making software drivers a long time ago for your now discontinued device. The problem is that they do not want to spend the resources to create drivers for a product that they no longer make. So if you have an old video card, audio card, modem, etc, it quite possibly won't work with XP. If you try to install XP you will get all kinds of incompatible error messages. So do yourself a favor and put old wine into old bottles, and new wine into new ones; consider getting a newer machine if you are going to upgrade to XP. You might wind up spending close to the same amount of money upgrading your components to make it work, as you would to just simply buy a new one. Check with all of your hardware manufacturers to see if they produced XP drivers for your existing hardware. Hope this helps.

I will admit, although I have a great love for the Apple line, that Microsoft Windows XP is a stable and friendly Operating System. Emerging from the ashes of the 9x line with the NT Kernel, Windows XP builds upon the foundation which 2000 laid.

Although I can not say that it is as stable as Mac OS 10.2 (or 10.1 for that matter), I will admit that Windows XP is pretty solid and stable. Coming from a heritage of blue screens of death, XP gives users very few problems. There will always be, because of the vast array of hardware products available (as well as buggy drivers), times when Windows will crash. In my experience, this has indeed happened. However, it definitely does not occur as frequently as it did in the old 9x line. For the most part, I can go for a week without a crash (or semi-crash) and this, in itself, makes me happy.

The really good thing about XP, especially for a user who is learning the system through the eyes of a Mac OS lover, is that it is extremely user friendly. Although the driver installation process is almost completely foreign to many users, it is not a problem when it is needed because XP explains the processes very well, without confusing users. Also, it is very easy to deal with networking in XP, including wireless networking (which is extremely nice when you don't feel like wiring your house for a personal network). All in all, compared with its predecessors, XP is based on a much more intuitive interface.

So, indeed, even a Macintosh lover can admit that Windows XP is quite a good Operating System. I feel that it is both stable and intuitive, giving it 4 stars out of 5.

I have a love/hate with Windows XP right now: I love the new look and the new features, but I hate the fact that BOTH computers I have on Windows XP crash repeatedly and often. This is NOT the stable OS Microsoft talks about in their ads -- at least not yet!

On the positive side, as several other reviewers have remarked, the new Plug and Play is beautiful. Support for wireless, pictures, video, and music is dramatically improved. You can work with all of these objects right at the desktop level. The operating system loads faster and feels faster. I think it's more intuitive and more fun to use, too.

HOWEVER, BE WARNED: I have the very latest version (with all the updates) on TWO computers, and BOTH are crashing on me. One system is a new Dell Latitude CP810 laptop I purchased with Windows XP Professional installed. This crashes, oh, probably 3-4 times per day. The crashes are random, but always seem to take place when I click on something: I'll click on a link in Internet Explorer, or my calendar in Outlook. BAM! The computer restarts. I had a similar Dell Laptop running Windows 2000 (Service Pack 2) and never had ANY crashes with it. So the stability factor has gone WAY down.

I've submitted numerous crash and bug reports to Microsoft and the system always says I'll be contacted within a few days by email -- I've not received any response in 10 days despite repeated queries and crashes. My conclusion from this is that
Microsoft is just swamped with crashes on this not-ready-for-prime-time OS.

The other computer is an HP Pavillion that formerly ran Windows 2000 and never crashed. Just last night, it decided to crash while nothing happened at all! Not good.

I hope Microsoft will fix it, as Windows XP has a lot of potential.

But as of now, I cannot recommend this product. Even though it restarts faster from crashes, that's still not a fair trade for having a stable system. Stick with Windows 2000 until Microsoft figures out how to REALLY keep this OS from crashing. It is definitely FAR from crash proof right now as I can attest!

Unlike Windows "CRASH" Millenium, Windows XP PRO seems to work and contain the back end "stuff" you need to build sites, connect them to back end data sources, mess around with Perl and other web technologies.

It is likely to render some of your hardware and software inoperable until you get new software and drivers. So far, the Canon Scanner doesn't work, Roxio's CD creator (as mentioned by another reviewer) requires an $80.00 upgrade to work, drivers for the Creative sound card had to be installed 3x, the latest version of WinAmp died for a while, and there may be more. After a couple days, it's only had one crash that the computer seemed to think was serious enough to contact Microsoft about.

XP Home will work for the average surfer/graphics/HTML/Office user, but beyond that, Pro is necessary. So far, it does seem like a big leap in reliability and functionality from anything I've used in the past - 3.1, 95, 98, & ME. Though its too early to tell, the rating might need to go up a star or two if it doesn't start to implode after its been used for a while.

The color scheme in the interface changed to what looks like some kind of kids playschool theme but the actual layout is very similar to previous versions and doens't take much getting used to.

Just remember, THERE IS A BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN "HOME" AND "PRO" in terms of functionality for those that work on the web and want to do anything that requires PWS or IIS.

As many reviews have stated, Windows XP is a significant step forward in features and ease of use. BUT, there are real problems becasue not all the hardware drivers needed to effectively install Windows XP are available yet. Specifically, drivers are not yet available for my 15 month old HP 8250i CD-RW and my brand new Creative Modem Blaster V.92. The general IDE CD driver that Microsoft provides allows me to read standard software and audio CD's; but without the correct HP specific driver for my CD drive, I cannot read my data back-up CD's nor use the CD drive to burn new CD's. The Microsoft generic V.90 modem driver seems to work OK, but I suspect that once a specific driver for my modem is released; hopefully, I will get a little better performance.

One other problem I discovered is that my Norton 2001 Anti-Virus and Utilities is not compatable with Windows XP--forcing me to buy Norton 2002 Anti-Virus and Utilities. So the (money) that I planned to spend to upgrade to Windows XP grew to (much more).

In spite of these problems, I like Windows XP. My recommedation is to upgrade to XP, but wait 90 days or so until
XP compatible drivers become available.

Bottom line, off the top: if you have Win98/95, upgrade. If you have Win2K, stay right where you are.

For all the pretty screens and rounded buttons that MS slaps on their products, WinXP is still Windows, and still prone to the same issues that plague the many versions of Windows. It's still somewhat unstable (NO OS is crashproof, by the way), insecure, and a complete resource hog. They have cleaned up the networking components (the Connection Sharing piece is very inuitive), and while the GUI is nice, I noticed definite slowdowns.

Value-adds: IE 6 is more of the same. Windows Media 8 is invasive (it logs every piece of media you play) bloatware. It was great around version 5, when it was thin, fast, and played music without complication. Use Winamp or Sonique. Built-in CD copying is kludgy at very best; use a third-party app for truly efficient, fast CD-writing.

All in all? Not bad. Win2K with more hand-holding and more CPU-choking graphics...

I upgraded from Windows 2000 Pro to XP Pro. While this is probably one of Microsoft's best efforts to date, it just hasn't lived up to the [amount]hat I paid to get the upgrade. To start things off, my Creative SBLive! card failed miserably on both upgrade and scratch install and neither the Creative nor the Windows driver solved the issue. I finally had to use a different sound card, which just irritates me -- but that's really a problem with Creative not Microsoft.

Secondly, the autoplay on the CDs/DVDs is annoying. Best to go get the TweakUI power tool and disable it. I found that my CD-ROM would get so tied up every time I loaded a CD, that I just disabled the autoplay feature.

Also, a Java VM is no longer built in due to the MS/Sun legal battles -- so after I did the scratch install to attempt to fix my sound problems, I then found out that I had no VM for web viewing. Had to settle for the Sun Java VM which is much slower. They aren't going to provide the VM from the SP when they release it.

If you have Windows 2000 or Windows 98 -- then keep it -- unless you have to have it for some hardware or software that you have. Wait until service pack 2 comes out (or later). Let XP get through the wringer thoroughly. If you're running Windows ME, then XP is more stable (since it is based on NT) and might be worth the upgrade cost if you have stability issues -- but as for me, since I can't ship it back because I've opened the software, I'll keep it. But, if I could get my full retail price back, I'd go back to Windows 2000.