Living with Windows XP

Windows XP won't ignite a flagging hi-tech industry and generate the billions of dollars the western democracies need in order to keep bombing poor peasants in the Afghan hills, but it's still pretty good.

We've been using the ‘Operating system' for a couple of months now and have adapted to it quite nicely thank you.

Initially, we took up the option to make the interface look like our old familiar Win95/98. There seemed no point struggling to find the ‘programs' icon on the Start bar that Microsoft felt the need to move. Beyond that, the new rounded look and feel is transparent to us now, where once it seemed garish and designed for infants.

Most useful has proved the ‘system restore' addition that you can invoke when you break your PC. This, of course happens regularly to us fiddlers with technology. Anyhow, using our BT Anytime account means we have to log on to the Openworld site each morning. There, over the past couple of months we've found a page offering to update our Anytime software to a newer faster version. We took BT up on this upgrade offer only to find it totally screwed the system. A quick click on XP's ‘system restore' allowed us to go back to a date before the ‘upgrade' yet keep any documents we'd saved since that date. Perfect. Just to satisfy our curiosity we ‘upgraded' again a few days later only to find we had to go through the whole rigmarole once again. The doubly restored system still functions perfectly.

XP lets you set up multiple users on the system, each with a different identity. This is useful in a household full of kids, say, or an office of hot-deskers. One of you takes on the role of system administrator, barring, say, porn from the minors or password protecting certain documents or programs.

Curiously, running Office 2000 on XP on a laptop away from the desk last week caused Office to fatally crash mid story. The Office error message apologised and asked whether we should like to inform Microsoft of our troubles over the Internet, which we duly did. We still have heard nothing and Office still doesn't work. Unless, strangely, I log on to the computer as someone else, in which case Office works perfectly. Paranoid, me? You betcha. µ