My recent re-formatting of my system hard drive and the brand, spanking new installation of WindowsXP Professional went extremely well. It’s a different animal – in a familiar sort of way.
First thing I had to do was set all the display properties to “Classic Windows” – – I just couldn’t take the Fischer Price display of WinXP. It made me feel like I was sitting on the floor, drooling, playing with Leggos. I couldn’t take it — so I changed it. Whew – comfort.
So far, my machine flies through projects and programs that it didn’t fly through before.
The one feature of XP that I am absolutely loving the hell out of is the “Remote Desktop” feature.
No more PCAnywhere! yahoooooo!
The remote desktop in XP is flawless. See, I have a laptop and a desktop. My laptop is wireless — so I can go anywhere with it. I didn’t want to set up all my email shit on my laptop — so I used to use PCAnywhere to log into my desktop so I could read my email while I was sitting outside on the deck with my laptop. It suited it’s purpose. But the display with PCAnywhere was typically slow….and my systems are no pussy systems, if ya know what I mean.
I couldn’t believe the speed in which Remote Desktop handled these tasks from my laptop. There is no delay. There is no resolution difference. It’s flawless and perfect, and I’m in love. So far.
I don’t remain in love with operating systems for very long. We’ll call this my honeymoon period.
i feel ya girl! i have to use pcanywhere to communicate with my work pc, because i have old old windows 98 there. it would be so much better if we all just joined the 21st century, got XP and used remote desktop.
side note: i got used to the fischer price display of regular xp and it feels weird if i don’t use it at home. le sigh.
haha I fisher price myself to hell and back. Even go one step further and set it up to be fisher price in SILVER!
Remote desktop rules its true.
But come one.. clunk clunk classic? nooooooo move onwards my dear!
You know, the honeymoon would last if you switched to Mac OS X 🙂
Nice try, Vinny-poo 😛
So you have the same sort of relationship with your operating system as you do with your blog template 😉 *heh*
Let me know when you’re ready for a real OS and I’ll hook you up with Slackware Linux.
Thanks for the offer, Robin – – maybe someday…I just haven’t had the heart to try cracking open penguins, just yet 🙂
Robin has good intentions, but until Adobe releases Photoshop for Linux, it will be a waste of time and WINE doesn’t work worth a dime! Robin will know what I am referring to…I’m running a box with SuSE 9.0/RedHat 9.0, but if I want to get work done, I always return to the Win XP box…despite having a Mac OS X box running right next to it. I see no reason to further my 10 year experiment with Linux when Mac OS X is the best running of version Free BSD or Linux out there. It just works and no reinstalls necessary when you pick the wrong video parameters…which is the biggest downfall of Linux.
Actually, James, that turns out not to be the case. 🙂
I can say from personal experience that the Linspire (the OS formerly known as Lindows {g}) -specific form of WINE allows you to run MS Office 2000 under Linux. If you like I can mail you (or Lisa) screencaps of installation and operation. 🙂 If you ask me, Linspire is an excellent “Aunt Minnie” flavor of Linux.
FWIW, I think XP Pro is an excellent OS, although I find it resource-hungry compared to 2000, and I can compare them because I have two Athlon systems on my desk; one with XP, one with Win2k. XP, however, has a better driver base, especially multimedia devices.
Other Linux irritations, depending on flavor: no keychain drive support, no USB /firewire drive support, no NTFS support when dual-booting, poor dependency resolution… Sigh… And yes, I know, certain distros address some of these issues, but very few address all of them. Which brings me back to Linspire. I can do all those things, and it will even automount hotplug devices to the desktop. Click’n’Run installation of new apps is painless and nearly bulletproof.
That said, I wish I had the time and energy to get into Slackware. I’ve seen a fellow student at Miami U. make that puppy sit up and do tricks. It was impressive. But John really was a guru, and I’m too old and tired to re-gurufy myself for Yet Another OS, just so I can make it work well. For that I’ll buy a Mac. Heh.
No, really. I wish I had the money to buy at least a mid-level iMac, or a single-processor G5 system. That would be great.
I have to admit it: I’m a platform slut. I’m just too easy.. Heh. I’ll take ’em all!
Oh, John, just to be annoyingly nit-picky: FreeBSD and/or OS X is not GNU/Linux. (ducking for cover)
Casey,
Unfortunately, my employer has problems with my Office XP files sometimes when they open under the company issued Office 97 suite, so I would be playing with fire if I went to running Office 2000 under WINE. I deal with some people who are very computer illiterate.
What I don’t understand is how Adobe can make Photoshop run under a version of FreeBSD, yet how hard can it be to make it run under Linux? It would be virtually 90% of the same code…
Dunno, James. My guess is that Apple bent over backwards to make sure that worked. 🙂