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So I have had some time with it by now and here's my opinion. The preview
version that I installed on my laptop is RC2, and at this time is available
from Microsoft for $10. It looks nicer and is a bit more user-friendly than
any previous Windows, and is supposed to be very robust and reliable. After
putting it through some very excessive testing, I can conclude that it
probably is. That is, after Microsoft fixes some issues with it. So far,
two programs that should work in XP have been problematic and both of these
are from Microsoft. One is Excel, which works fine most of the time, but
gives the blue screen and dump of memory when trying to print a spreadsheet
with macros/VBA. The second one is - you'll never guess - screensaver!!!
Of course then there are programs that are not supposed to work in XP like
the obvious Norton Utilities, Partition Magic, and Adaptec's CD Creator and
Direct CD, but hopefully these will be updated soon. Trading applications,
C++ compiler (Borland), Matlab, etc. have all been running fine in XP.
Testing that I did consisted of running some pretty extensive optimizations
in TS (where I had 6 worksheets with a total of 25 charts open all the
time), exporting the results to Excel, running VBA applications on these
results, outputting the stuff from Excel to PaperPort as report sheets, and
editing signals in EL Editor between the tests. To make matters more
difficult, I listened to mp3-s and watched some DVD movies during the very
boring routine testing. All applications performed fine under XP, although
DVD playback was expectedly not very smooth.
So why did I go with XP instead of Win2000 for all this? My laptop came
with Me which was just horrible, but installing Win 2000 failed for so many
times that eventually I gave up (probably some driver problems, but I could
not pinpoint it). Just for a change I downloaded and installed XP and that
process went very smoothly - all necessary drivers were included there..
Conclusion: when Win XP will be out, I probably will get the real version
for my laptop. Hopefully the issues I mentioned (and that I still may
encounter) will get solved. I like the user interface and speed (it is
slightly faster-responding than 2000, also boots up faster). Plus there are
some other nice features (including built-in CD-recording). But will I
upgrade my desktop that currently is running 2000? Probably not. And
frankly, in terms of features, I can't think of a reason why someone would
need XP for running any trading applications. If it really proves itself
more robust than NT or 2000, then yes, but just the extra features are in my
opinion not good enough reason to upgrade. Disclaimer: just my 2-cent
opinion, not affiliated with Microsoft etc.
Ivo
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