XP-aladocious

I spent the evening last night upgrading my Win98 computer to WinXP. And I do mean the evening. Their "estimated time remaining" indicator really is an estimate--nigh unto guesstimate. At one point I watched it take eight minutes for four minutes to elapse. On the bright side, I also got the dry spots in my front lawn watered.

Once it was completed I eagerly rebooted and awaited computing nirvana. No, I did not take flight. I was quite bummed about that. But it does boot up faster as promised, which is pretty darn close to computing nirvana in my book. A few other notable points:

- I despise the XP windows scheme. Fluffy rounded windows in primary colors, with puffy buttons. It's a kinder, gentler Windows. Ick. I notice they don't have that in XP Professional, which I use at work. The good news is they anticipated my curmudgeonly reaction and included an option to use the old windows look. And I do.

- They don't seem to think I'd ever want to disconnect my dial-up internet connection. Hey genuises, if I could afford another phone line I'd just get DSL! They do give you the option to add the monitor icon to your task bar, but it seems to forget that setting when you reboot.

- On the other hand, my dial-up internet connection seems to have lost its case of bit-constipation. It would tend to download just fine for about five minutes, then just hang for about two minutes. Then, like an old codger who drifted off in the middle of a sentence it'd wake up and resume downloading. Annoying as all get-out. Also, hasn't happened since I finishing installation last night. And here I was blaming my phone line, my ISP, and the Bush Administration.

- We take a lot of digital photos, so the photo viewer they built in is well worth the price of the upgrade in my book. It'll save us skads of time.

- All my desktop icons (of which there are far too many) got randomly rearranged. Would it have been too much to ask that they remember where they all were and put them back when they're done?!

- I can access my mp3 player now. But I still can't find the files I put on it while I was at work when I first bought it. The memory manager can tell that they're there, but they won't show up in Explorer or any other tool I've tried to use. And since that time my work computer crashed and had to be rebuilt. Now IT can't find those files again, either! Evidently the only one who can see my files is my friend, whose computer I used last weekend just to test my theory. And silly me, I didn't delete the darn things when I had the chance! I thought that maybe, just maybe, when my XP upgrade came it would fix the problem.

- Even though the computer is not connected to a network, XP is convinced it should be. I'll have a useless icon on my task bar forever! Hey geniuses, see point two! If I can't afford DSL, I can't afford a second computer and networking gear, either!

- This darn thing is going to nag me every day that I don't have virus protection. I did once, but it took over my computer and made it so I couldn't use certain things--just like a virus!

- I need a new monitor. This one is dark, and the picture I've had on the desktop for the last year and a half has been burned permanently into the screen. I've known about the former, but I didn't notice the latter until the install forced me to use a new picture.

- The CD jacket is oversized. Way oversized. Turkeys.

So, my overall impression? I'm a moderate geek. What do you think? I LOVE IT!

Moderately, of course.