** Craig c@wizball.co.uk [2003-06-01 10:59]:
On Sat, May 31, 2003 at 11:44:12PM +0100, Paul Tansom wrote:
OK, not a good title for a Linux list, but I couldn't resist commenting on my first attempt at installing Windows XP (Professional) given that people often say Linux is hard to install.
Blah. Everything is difficult to install ;)
Agreed, Windows has the advantage in perception terms because so few people actually have to install it!
<snip>
Next comes the networking side of things:
IE - fine, can browse the Internet and is pretty fast, can also browse my local Intranet Explorer - cannot see any other machines on the network, when it should be able to see two other Windows 2000 boxes
Of course, IE browse the Internet real quick. Though opera wins miles ahead. I read a paper about how IE was being able to render sites quickly... very interesting.
Though, IE is considered 'old' nowadays...
Well I was actually comparing to IE on my Windows 2000 boxes - only two and one is a dual boot laptop, it's not something I like to make too much of a habit of ;-) Opera is fast by virtue of some heavy caching - often too much IMHO, but I still make major use of it. Not looked at anything on how IE does it so quickly - got any links?
From the other Windows 2000 boxes the machine shows up in Network
Neighbourhood, but when I try to see what is shared I get an error saying the machine is not accessible.
Conclusion - Windows XP does not integrate easily into an existing Windows network!
Typical of Windows to do that. I remember telling Windows 95/98 to pick up the local network neighbourhood at our monthly LAN nights. Normally the problems are located right down to the LAN card, wrong IP set up etc. Oh the hassles.....
IP is not an issue here as I'm using DHCP. The one I do find a pain is the nightmare of the browse-master elections every time a new machine joins or leaves the network - nasty.
One thing, Microsoft really did good at.. office, money and er... that's it ;)
I have to disagree here, I really detest Office as I spend too much time fighting it to get things laid out the way I want them. Wordperfect always used to be my favourite, and I used to make a lot of use of Amipro/Wordpro as that was the default package at work for about 10 years, although I did start to make inroads on getting StarOffice as the replacement just before I left - mainly because Smartsuite 3.1 for Windows 3.1 was pretty ancient by 2000 and Office was too expensive, but nobody wanted to invest in the new Smartsuite package, so the free nature of StarOffice (at the time) won the day, coupled with implementing the Calendar server (looking forward to the OpenOffice replacement for that BTW).
** end quote [Craig]