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Windows XP made its entry into Chennai in the last week of October.
The consumer launch in Chennai, which took place at one of the city's
leading five star hotels was part of Microsoft's consumer and media
launches and publicity parties worldwide.
 To
attend the consumer launch all one had to do was to fill out a few
details and register at Microsoft India's site www.msn.co.in/windowsxp
and then print an invitation pass with one's name on it. And
then it was on to the daylong briefing about Windows XP and the
exposition by the world's leading PC and components makers.
Sony, AMD, Intel, Wipro, HCL, NIIT and Microsoft had
on display their range of products from the latest processors to
software courses. NIIT is incidentally the official training
partner for Microsoft.
Originally scheduled to be held every
hour, the briefing had to be rescheduled to every fifteen minutes and also had
to be relocated from the original location because of the huge crowd.
 Onto
the actual product, which is causing all this hype. Windows
XP is being touted as the best thing to happen to PCs after Windows
95.
For starters, there is a huge change
in the User Interface (UI) from the Windows 95 / 98 (Win 9x), NT / ME / 2000
to Windows XP. Windows XP lays claim to be a more stable Operating System than
the Win 9x series and ME, as it is built on the more reliable Windows 2000 code
base. It requires a system with a minimum of Pentium 400 Mhz and 128
MB RAM with atleast 4 GB of free disk space.
Microsoft has extended its policy
of product activation from Office XP to Windows XP also. There
has been a lot of hue and cry about this, since this means that the end user
cannot install his licensed copy of Windows XP on his laptop, if he has installed
it once on his desktop. Though this move is meant to prevent large-scale
piracy, it has not gone down well with end users who have multiple systems at
home. Many end users feel that Microsoft would do better to reduce its prices
to phase out piracy. Another draw back of this feature is that, if there
are more than two or three hardware changes in the system configuration, the
OS gets locked, because it identifies the system as a new computer. You will
then have to contact the Microsoft Customer Service to get your OS reactivated.
 There
are two editions of Windows XP - Windows XP Home for the home users
and Windows XP Professional for small businesses and networks.
The price of Windows XP has certainly not enthused many customers.
The best move would be to wait till at least two service packs are
released. By then most of the bugs would have been identified
and removed by Microsoft.
Windows XP in a nutshell is a powerful and more complete operating system with
improved perfomance on earlier OS' and comes with a host of new
sleek features and easy to use multi-media tools.
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