Windows XP

I began working with computers over 25 years ago, at a small community college in California. That college had a machine called a PDP-11/45, which supported 16 students at a time. It had a whopping 20 megabytes of disk space, 128 kilobytes (!) of memory, and was one of the more interesting computing experiences of my life. The freedom of working on a machine that didn't do all that much for it's users or operators was incredible. I think I learned more in a few months about computers and how they work than any ten students learn in a year using a modern computer.

After I was hired in my first job in the real world, I continued working on these PDP machines, and eventually moved to something new called a VAX. These were awesome - fast, powerful and very flexible. In fact, they were arguably the best machines of the time (mid 1980s) and in many ways the VAX is superior to the machines and operating systems of today.

In the early 1980s, my boss decided we were going to learn about a new machine, a wonderful box called a Macintosh. I was skeptical (having only seen a few incredibly lame machines which ran CP/M) but decided to keep an open mind.

It didn't take me long to fall in love with the Macintosh computer. It was easy to use, simple to install, and had lots of interesting software. I could see that this machine was easily the best small computer on the market. Combined with the VAX for the mainframe system, these little computers were, in my opinion, poised to take over the world.

However, times change and companies are not always run well. Digital Equipment Corporation (which manufactured the VAX and PDP-11 machines) was apparently run by a pair of trained monkey's (no, I take that back - that would be insulting the poor chimps), and Apple was not much better off. Two companies with extremely strong product lines were almost totally destroyed by their own incompetence and an abundance of stupid decisions. Sigh.

I did keep my eye on the "other" architecture - that offered by Microsoft. At first it was not very impressive. DOS was just another flavor of CP/M, which was never very impressive. Windows 3.1 and 3.5 were, well, not very useful to a real business, and Windows 95, although it looked good, simply was not solid enough to be used in any office.

Finally Microsoft produced Windows NT and I could see the promise in the product. Yes, it was a young operating system and tended to be a little unstable, but it had strengths. One of the biggest recommendations was simple - Microsoft had hired much of the VAX team away from Digital Equipment Corporation and assigned them to the Windows NT development team. I trusted these engineers (since they produced the best operating system in the world) and decided to begin to deploy this new system.

I've never regretted that decision. Windows NT made a fine desktop and server platform. Yes, it has had a few growing pains, but in the five years or so since we rolled it out, the operating system has more than met expectations.

Windows 2000 and Windows XP have built upon that solid base to become perhaps the premier operating systems available from any company anywhere on the planet today. I've been using Windows 2000 on servers and Windows XP on workstations for a while now, and I must admit that I am thoroughly impressed.

Windows XP is an especially fine desktop operating system. Oh, I know that many out there in the industry put down the product, but my own experience is good. 

The operating system is extremely stable. The dreaded blue screen of death has all but disappeared and crashes have almost ceased to exist.

Windows XP performs very well on the appropriate hardware. In today's world, I think it's an incredible bargain to get Windows XP install on a Pentium 4 for under a thousand dollars. Wow.

The interface has so many options and features that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to list them in one article. In fact, that's one of the primary difficulties we've had with rolling out this new operating system - it has so many features that it's almost overkill. We find ourselves turning off capabilities much more often than we find something lacking.

In spite of the news, we have found Windows XP (and Windows 2000) to be extremely secure. Yes, you do have to keep the systems up-to-patch, but that's just part of doing our job. We've found that we just had to follow published security guidelines (which is true of any operating system), which makes it easy to keep everything running well.

Of course, we were very annoyed at the games that Microsoft has played lately with software licensing, but we did our own study on Return on Investment. We found that Windows does not, contrary to popular opinion, have a lower return on investment than other operating systems. In fact, because Windows XP is so flexible, it increases everyone's productivity measurably over other operating systems that we've tried.

Of course, part of that equation is simply that our company uses the Windows operating system, and switching to another would be expensive. If we had to choose from scratch, the numbers would change.