Windows XP Revisited – Teaching the faithful old dog some new tricks
Lately it seems to be fashionable among Internet writers to compare and criticize operating systems. While one user talks about the merits of Ubuntu Linux versus Windows Vista on his blog, another is quick to criticize Ubuntu’s lack of user-friendly features and available software. In this article I am here to sing the praises of the old dog Windows XP. Once the singing and dancing multimedia favorite, XP is now the big brother of the much younger and more modern Windows Vista. While Vista may be the life and soul of the party, it is still a problem child for many users who are frustrated by incompatibilities, poor driver support, and degraded performance in multimedia applications and games. If, like me, your Vista experience wasn’t quite what you hoped for, read on as we take another look at Windows XP and discover that it really can teach an old dog some new tricks.
Security
One of the biggest surprises long-time Windows users had to deal with when upgrading to Vista was the new security measures, specifically User Account Controls. Microsoft’s response to the problem of rampant malware on Windows machines was a barrage of security controls that can quickly become daunting. While emulating this feature may seem like a bad idea, UAC is a partial solution to a very complicated problem and the alternative, allowing malware to continue to spread unhindered, is not really an option. Although you can’t have Vista-style user account control in XP, there are several alternatives. An aggressive firewall product, like Outpost Firewall, not only monitors Internet traffic, but also alerts you when programs misbehave or perform potentially dangerous operations. Outpost costs $39.95 per year and includes a regularly updated spyware scanner.
Sudown is similar to UAC and allows you to temporarily elevate the privileges of a limited account to an administrator account to run programs like installers. Sudown is less intrusive than UAC but arguably less secure and less comprehensive (you may need to log in to the admin account under some conditions). Sudown is a free utility and is available on sourceforge.
Windows Explorer
Windows Explorer introduced several significant updates in Vista. Handling of photos and multimedia files has been improved and search has been fully integrated. Introduced “breadcrumbs”, this is a somewhat strange name that Microsoft gave to its new Windows Explorer extension that allows convenient navigation between directories and subdirectories.
While you can’t quite reproduce Windows Vista’s browser, you can actually do better. Directory Opus is the most powerful file manager/explorer on the planet and works great with Windows XP. While a bit intimidating at first, most users will quickly learn to appreciate the power and flexibility this utility offers. Outperforming Vista’s new Windows Explorer in almost every department and with powerful photo/multimedia features, Directory Opus is really worth learning and there are many comprehensive tutorials available on the internet to help new users. Directory Opus costs around $70 per license. If you want to learn more about this excellent utility, start here.
Search
Windows Vista’s built-in desktop search is one of my favorite new features in the operating system. Here, XP lags a bit behind its little brother, but it’s not a completely lost cause. Many users don’t realize it, but Microsoft Desktop Search is also available for free for Windows XP. While it lacks the seamless integration with Windows Explorer, it’s still a powerful tool. You can download Desktop Search for XP
here.
Looking to really get organized? Desktop search is nice, but many of us have stacks of CD-Rs or DVD-Rs lying around our workplaces. Wouldn’t it be great if there was something that could also neatly catalog all those files? Well, there is. The aptly named “Where is it?” it is able to neatly organize and catalog not only the files on your hard drive, but also the files saved on removable drives. Where is it? It’s shareware, with the full version costing $39.95 per license. Enter “Where is” in Google to get more information.
look and feel
For those systems that can run it, the new Aero interface in Windows Vista is fast and beautiful. By comparison, the blues and creams of Windows XP look distinctly state-of-the-art. Of course, beauty is only skin deep and what really matters is functionality. That said, a little more flashiness obviously appeals to a lot of people, as numerous websites and utilities have sprung up for Windows XP for the sole purpose of making the operating system look better. The pinnacle of these utilities is Stardock’s Object Desktop suite. With just a few clicks, you can instantly transform the look of your XP desktops into any of the hundreds of visual styles available for download from the Stardock website. Do you want Aero-like special effects in Windows XP? Object Desktop Window FX can do them, and you can even customize exactly which visual effects to use. Do you want two start menus? No problem, with Objectbar you can do that too. Do you want Windows Dreamscene animated wallpapers? Well, sorry, you’re out of luck this time. The price of all this pimping at the desk? $49.95. For more information or to download a trial version, Google Object Desktop. All this talk about desktop enhancements leads us nicely to:
Sidebars and widgets
Windows Vista comes with its own sidebar with detachable widgets, but sidebars and widgets are old news on Windows (and, indeed, on most other modern operating systems, too). My favorite XP sidebar is the unoriginally named “Desktop Sidebar.” This sidebar is highly configurable, neat and includes the best RSS feed reader/bookmark of all the sidebars and widgets I’ve tried. In fact, I even run the Desktop Sidebar in preference to the Views sidebar on my Windows Vista installation. Google “desktop sidebar” for more information.
If widgets are your thing, there are currently several competing standards. The Open Widget Engine is slowly gaining momentum, with the goal of one day uniting the efforts of widget makers around the world. Until that day comes, you can choose between Google Desktop, Desktop X, and Yahoo Widgets. Desktop X is a powerful widget engine that is included as part of the Object Desktop suite that I mentioned in the Look and Feel section. The respective offerings from Yahoo and Google are free and therefore much more popular. Yahoo Widgets probably has the best selection of widgets out of all the widget engines available. Again, do a quick Google search for the program you’re most interested in to find out more.
media center
The media center edition of Windows XP has been around for a while, but an upgrade to Vista Ultimate or Home Premium will give you full media center capabilities included in the price. If you are using Vanilla XP Home or Professional and want media center capabilities, they are available for free in the form of Media Portal, a highly configurable, open source media center application. It’s also free and worth checking out (at least if you’re American) at Yahoo Go For TV. Based on Meedio, which was one of the best commercial media center products for Windows, Go For TV seems to have stalled since Yahoo took over. However, a wide range of plugins and accessories are already available that were previously developed for Meedio. Strangely, Yahoo currently insists on blocking all users outside of the United States, so if you live in another part of the world, don’t. Set up Google searching for “media portal” or “Yahoo Go for TV” to get more information.
Games and Direct X 10
As any PC gamer will tell you, XP is (at the time of writing) the best operating system for gaming. With Vista, Microsoft introduced DirectX10 and made it for Vista only. A number of impressive DirectX 10 games are regularly featured on the preview pages of major PC gaming websites and magazines. Microsoft’s forefront for DirectX10/Vista basically consist of Shadowrun (an above average multiplayer FPS) and Halo 2 (a conversion of an old Xbox game). Replaying a previous-gen console title to show off its cutting-edge graphics technology must have made sense to someone at Microsoft, but it makes little sense for gamers to assess whether an upgrade to Vista is worth their money, especially in light of the performance handicap or paralyzed. sound that some games exhibit under Vista. However, like every new gaming platform, XP and Christmas gamers can expect to watch with envy as new Vista games start to appear. If you expect me to tell you now a way to get DirectX 10 to work on XP, you’ll be disappointed. A company called Falling Leaf Systems claims to be working on some kind of project that would accomplish this feat, but they still have a lot to prove, especially considering that early versions struggled to run the most basic DirectX 10 demo code. It looks like DirectX 10 is a trick that XP isn’t going to pull anytime soon, if at all.
So there you have it, far from being in its last stages, Windows XP is still a very capable operating system with a few tricks up its sleeve. If you’re willing to invest in a little new software mentioned in this article (much of which also works with Vista), you can easily transform your XP into a top-tier operating system and still enjoy your old games and multimedia software.