Letters

Any letters or e-mails received on an adventuring-related topic
may be reprinted in here unless marked 'not for publication'.
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Last issue, Julia Munday asked if anyone had any experience of
Windows XP. Dave Booth sent in the following just as the magazine
was going out and here is what he wrote.

From Dave Booth, Nottingham by email

Just before the holidays I took delivery of a new PC - 1.8 P4, with
Windows XP. This being the first time I'd seen XP, I'd anticipated
problems but not quite what happened!

Surprisingly to me, I quite like the XP interface design. Sure, the
icons and menus are a bit 'kiddy' in that they're big and bright.
But otherwise there are some features that make using the PC that
bit easier.  Popup boxes tell you when installed devices or
programs change status (e.g. when you connect through a modem, a
box floats up saying 'Modem is now connected', and the box
disappears without user intervention after a few seconds). The Help
system is great, it includes all the old MS Knowledge Base articles
as well as reams of standard help text.  Probably the most
encouraging new feature is a 'roll back' feature. It applies both
to drivers, where installing a new device driver causes problems
you can roll back to the previous driver, and to the system config
itself - i.e. if you inadvertently fubar the whole system you can
reboot XP with a 'last known good' option and it will revert.

The new PC came with a 56k modem & on board sound and XP
pre-installed. I added two Ethernet NICs, one for the cable modem
and one for Internet Conn Sharing to my laptop, and a SB64 sound
card. The system autodetected them, recognised that one NIC was
connected to the CM and set it up accordingly, and established
connection sharing for the other NIC. Pretty slick stuff.

@~Does anyone else have any comment on the subject or might even
@~like to write an article about it? ... Sue
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