Flirtations with Windows XP

13 July 2003

My Sony VAIO boasts a proud “Designed for Windows 98” sticker. I’m not sure it really should be that proud of its heritage. At the time I purchased the laptop, two different versions were available. One shipped with Windows98, and the other with Windows 2000. I already owned a copy of 2000 which I could use on the machine, so opted to save a few pennies and bought the Windows98 version. Apart from a quick BIOS flash, the only remaining difference between the two was the sticker.

This week I reinstalled the laptop with Windows XP Pro. In fact, that’s a lie. I tried to reinstall with Windows XP (after reading positive things in Google Groups about compatibility and performance), but couldn’t get the CD image I had to boot on startup. Eager to discover if I had a poor burn or a hardware fault, I chucked a Windows Server 2003 disc in and booted up. This worked. So much so that before I could do much more about it I was half way through installing Windows Server 2003 and past the point of no return.

So for a short while this week, my aged Sony VAIO PIII 650Mhz 256Mb laptop was a Windows Server 2003 Server (stupid new naming convention…). It ran quite well, and was perfectly usable, but, really …

I managed to find a better Windows XP disc in the end and reinstalled (again). So now it runs XP, and does so very nicely. I’m not sure why my Dell Optiplex at work ran slower after installing XP, but this little laptop runs much more smoothly. So much so that I might even consider reinstalling my main box too.

Mind you, it’s still not a patch on OS X…

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

Comments

§ zlog: Hi,

I couldn’t find your email address anywhere on the site so the only way of contacting you was via comments (sorry, feel free to delete after you have read this). Can you please email the address I gave in the ”email” box?

Thanks
§ Drew: You (or anyone else) can email me with any user @ this domain name.

I’m sick of spam, so I chose not to publish my email address when I set up this new domain.
§ Nathan Pitman: SPAM is now such an issue at my work that we have a SPAM Trap.
§ Jesse: We have Spam Assasin.. and the SPAM is getting smarter.
§ Drew: I wonder if spam will just eventually burn out. The point of advertising is to get your product or service in the forefront of the consumer’s mind - it loses its effectiveness when:

a) everyone *hates* to receive it

b) there is so much advertising that no one thing stands out.

Imagine if every product or service you use on a daily basis was advertised on tv ... the adverts would be so numerous that they’d lose any/all effect.
§ tomjleeds: I’ve found that with XP, many people have said it makes their systems slower, while I (after an upgrade from ME, thankfully) found my system much faster and much more stable. Although, that could be to do with me ditching Norton in favour of AVG.

I must get about 30 spam emails per day. I’m even getting them to my new address, which I only set up a few weeks ago and haven’t given out to any forms or sites!

All in the <head>