From the Dark Side--Windows XP a Killer App, Quite Literally

Last week we downloaded the second public beta of Microsoft's new OS, Windows XP, to check out Mac OS X's competition and to see if the rumors that it ripped off the Aqua interface were true, they weren't. The Windows XP rc2 beta downloads as a 500+ MB .ISO file that has to be burned on a CD to install. We used Virtual PC and Roxio's Easy Creator CD to make the CD on our Power Mac G4 since no one at M$ was smart enough to figure out that the first public beta of Windows XP already installed on our Compaq may not support CD burning software that works on Windows ME--it didn't. When we left off last Friday we had inserted the CD, clicked on install, our Compaq restarted and then died, dead as a doornail. Nothing could get it to boot, not the emergency floppy nor the Compaq Restore CD.

It turned out that Windows XP rc2 shares a similar problem with Mac OS X, an aversion to unsupported graphics cards. Our monitor was hooked up to the onboard video but we had an ATI Radeon card in a PCI slot. That was fine for rc1 but not rc2. After removing it, the Compaq started up and rc2 installed over rc1 just fine. The first beta would not drive the Radeon but it tolerated its presence during installation. The second beta would not do either--is that progress or innovation? After installation of rc2 we found that we could reinstall the Radeon but could not get it to work.

We didn't notice anything new other than the Radeon card problem and rc2 seemed to work fine otherwise. The automatic software updater popped up and downloaded a couple of quick updates, perhaps including an immunization to the Code Red worm since Windows XP is based on the highly susceptible Windows 2000. If not, we may hear from our ISP.

How fast is the newer beta? We repeated the speed tests that we conducted with the first beta on our 633 MHz $400 Compaq and Mac OS X 10.0.4 on our Power Mac G4 533DP. We won't repeat the embarrassing OS X results until Mac OS X 10.1 comes out. Here is a comparison of Windows rc1 vs rc2:

Windows XP Performance (seconds)

Action	RC2	RC1
Power On to Login	40	41
Login to Desktop	6	6
Shutdown to Off	21	16
Launch Internet Explorer 5.5	3	3
Launch Acrobat 5.0	7	--
Scroll VPC4 Manual PDF	27	33

The results are an average of three in whole seconds. RC2 took longer to shut down but was faster at scrolling the Virtual PC v4 manual .pdf file. In our initial tests we forgot to time the launch of Internet Explorer so we rebooted. Our Compaq shut down and then nothing. A little grinding of the hard drive but no start up, just a black screen. Once again we couldn't boot, not from the drive, emergency floppy nor CompaQ Restore CD. Our Compaq is dead again. Has the killer app struck again? We had to again remove the Radeon card to get rc2 to boot the Compaq although we had booted successfully many times with it in--PC voodoo. The launch speed for IE was unchanged.

While it was running, there were three things that we liked: it ran quickly and snappy on our $400 PC, no applications ever crashed and M$ has provided a tutorial that walks one through Windows XP's features. The tutorial is a nice, helpful touch that Apple should emulate in the next iteration of Mac OS X, at least on new Macs.

We look forward to trying out Mac OS X 10.1. From our observations at Macworld, 10.1 seems nearly as fast or as fast as Windows XP in the above actions. We will confirm that when we get our hands on the new release. According to MacFixit, Apple has supplied developers with a downloadable version of 10.1 that requires it to be burned to a CD in order to install just like Windows XP and as we strongly suggested that Apple should do. We hope Apple will allow this method of distribution for the final version of 10.1--only a few more weeks to wait!