Microsoft Windows XP (Professional)

reply on September 4, 2006 by wjanoch

Windows XP has some advantages over other OSes for sure. It's not as bad as some wish to make it out, but with all Windows before XP they had good reason to form those opinions.<br><br>XP Rocks and OS X is really the only serious competition, but of course, Apple doesn't license OS X to run on any other manufacturer's hardware, so for those of use not buying a new box, XP and Linux are what we have to choose from. <br><br>XP's software install has a better feel than any Linux I've played with. Especially when you get into programs you have to compile. Sure I understand there's many flavors of linux, so a compile is the only way to be sure it'll run, but can't the community pick a linux to support with a binary installer that everyone can agree on? (everyone as in the top linux vendors). There's got to be some happy foundation to unify Linux at the core at least, wouldn't you think? <br><br>XP's got problems with the registry, but it's nice when you first install :-P<br><br>XP's biggest problem is cheap hardware. If the hardware a user has isn't well supported in XP (i.e. it's vendor is out of business or inept) then XP looks bad. You could spend for the best hardware, but then you'd spend more than a Mac (and with the new intel Macs being cheeper than similar PCs, that's truer than ever). <br><br>There are people who can communicate really well, then there's them folk who'd yak at ya and leave it hangin... and those that leave it hangin have no prob with a disfunctional PC cause it works like they do. <br><br>If you want XP to shine like it can, install it on good hardware from name brand vendors, and I don't mean DELL as they don't manufacture hardware, they build systems from othe vendor's hardware. HP and Apple are really the best sources for Windows hardware. Just don't buy the low end HPs and if you opt for Apple, you should get a good windows keyboard and mouse from Logitech and keep in mind that even their Bootcamp Beta is stable enough for production environments according to most analysts I've read.