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I was recently invited to participate in an event held by Microsoft in New York, partly to commemorate the imminent closing of Windows XP Release Candidate 1, and also to use that milestone as a way to bring in members of the press (like myself), get their feedback, and clear up any questions.

I wasn't about to pass this up. I wanted to follow up on a number of things: the XP boot-floppy issue (which I'll go into in a bit later), the fiasco-in-the-making that many people believed Product Activation was shaping up to be (along with the equally sticky wicket of licensing multiple copies for the home) -- but also some more basic and less controversial questions, like what the final system requirements for XP were shaping up to be.

First they herded us into one conference room to hear some opening remarks from John Frederiksen, General Manager of the PC Experience division at Microsoft. "Experience" was and has been a big word with Microsoft for a while now -- meaning, of course, what kind of experience a person has with their computer or Windows itself is going to shape the way they use it. Given that we use our PCs for a lot more than ever now, including things like entertainment (MP3s) and personal files (photos, video, etc.), a good out-of-the-box experience is crucial from the moment they slit the tape on the carton.

Apparently the single biggest problem that a lot of people had with their Windows PCs (aside from it crashing too frequently!) was that many people didn't know where anything was. Example: they'd scan in and save a picture and then not be able to find it -- a scenario that I've confirmed repeatedly on personal experience. Microsoft also found out that a lot of people didn't know how to set up things like multiple user profiles and had terrible problems with home networking. To that end, they have set out to rewrite a lot of things in Windows to make these things easier to work with. At the same time, though, I wondered how much of this could be disabled after the user has mastered everything -- and as it turns out, a good deal of it is.

Specific feedback on XP during the beta cycle turned up a few things. For one, XP was stabler than just about any previous version of Windows --Windows 2000 included. In my own working with XP for weeks at a time, I can safely say that I never ran into a problem that required me to reboot, never had a BSOD, and only had an application throw a Dr. Watson error on me once or twice. Their statement that XP will be the stablest version of Windows ever is no exaggeration, it seems -- although that stability will come with a price tag in the form of the kind of system you'll need to run it. (Again, more on that in a bit.)

Another thing people found during the beta cycle was there was a significant amount of stuff that didn't run on Windows 2000, but did run on Windows XP. I'd already heard a great deal about how XP used special hooks to get around the problems older programs had -- for instance, by deliberately mis-reporting the operating system version, which all by itself caused the vast majority of older programs to work. They stated flat-out that they were not trying to make Windows XP run absolutely everything since the 8-bit DOS days. One of the other folks in the audience pointed out that there were a lot of people still running DOS-based things like Clipper, which didn't have a chance of running on XP -- but I doubt people like that are going to be prime candidates for using Windows XP anyway.

Two more key pieces of information came out during the opening statements. One was a time line for the product. Release Candidate 1 was being wrapped up as we spoke and would be shipped out to us before the 4th of July. The final code will be released to manufacturing in Q3/01 -- and the drop-dead launch date is October 25, 2001. XP will be on shelves and in shrink in plenty of time for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Of course, it will be shipping on new PCs anywhere from three to four weeks before that in OEM editions.

The last new bit of information during that section was the system requirements, which were now completely final. A 233Mhz processor is the absolute minimum that XP will support; a 300 or better is recommended. At least 64MB of RAM is required; 128 is recommended. (My vote goes with 128; like NT and 2K before it, XP really takes off at 128 and does ever better the more RAM you add to it.) XP also requires 1.5GB of free space to install. (Obviously with newer PCs this is less of a problem, but it's still a lot of space -- once I get RC1 I'm going to see where all that space goes.) Some kind of Internet access is also recommended, for Product Activation and other features, but it isn't required. (PA can be done over the phone as well as via the Internet, but I suspect most people would rather do it electronically.)

Excerpted with permission from Windows 2000 Power Users Newsletter (http://www.win2kpowerusers.com/). it@tt wishes to thank Serdar Yegulalp, Editor, for allowing us to reproduce this original article. (c) 2001 Serdar Yegulalp.

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