I decided last night to install Windows XP. I viewed this task with no little trepidation, as my previous experiences with installing Windows (3.1, 95, 98 and ME) had been fraught with complications. However, I was looking forward to XP's most significant new feature, demonstrated repeatedly in the commercials: providing the user with the ability to fly without any mechanical aids.

I zipped up my entire Windows ME directory tree prior to beginning, because I planned to do a "clean install", which wipes out the prior version of Windows. This helps prevent version conflicts, but it requires reinstalling all software that puts its settings in the Registry. Back in the old days of .INI files, a reinstall of the operating system rarely required reinstallation of the applications. (This is apparently Microsoft's idea of "progress": Make Everything Harder For The User).

When installing previous versions of Windows, I'd always copied the Setup files onto the local hard drive, which (1) made the install process faster, and (2) obviated the need to reinsert the CD when installing new hardware. For some reason, though, Setup didn't like this under XP (which, as it turns out, was unnecessary; Setup now contains the ability to do exactly the same thing, but on its own terms).

My first panic came when Setup rebooted for the first time, and a message appeared, informing me that the "My Documents" folder might be deleted. Mind you, the boot process was now set to enter Setup automatically, meaning I couldn't get to a command prompt to save those documents. This warning was not in the pre-install instructions! As it turned out, "My Documents" was not deleted, but Windows XP looks in a different place for each user -- meaning that the documents appear to have been deleted, even though they're still present. (Thanks for the heart attack, Microsoft.)

Next, I noticed a message proclaiming, "Windows XP not only starts faster than any previous version of Windows..." This is, unfortunately, a lie. Oh, admittedly, it's significantly faster than Windows ME, which was itself faster than Windows 98. But after I'd installed, I clocked the startup time at 15 seconds on my 1.7 GHz Pentium 4. Sorry, Microsoft, but Windows 3.1 started in under 10 seconds on my 25 MHz '386 way back when. It is a big improvement over ME, though; I'll grant them that.

Next, I was amused by the boast that Windows XP lets its users share modems. That was a standard feature of OS/2 Warp 3, back before Win95 had even been released. Actually, OS/2 let its users share the COM ports themselves, not just modems.

Finally, the self-promotion was over and it started asking me for input. It asked me to set up my network card. Which I did. It then asked me to set up my second network card. I only have one network card -- it had diagnosed my FireWire card as an Ethernet card, and displayed that one first (and I couldn't use the same values in the *actual* network card's setup).

Because of that, it informed me that the Internet was not available (hardly surprising, considering it was trying to talk to my videocamera). Then it asked me if I wanted to activate Windows XP over the Internet. Duh.

Well, finally it was installed (and, remarkable as it is, far less painfully than I had anticipated). The new interface is garish and cartoonlike, and spends lots of needless time displaying unnecessary froth and frippery (like sliding menus out rather than simply popping them up, or putting alpha-channel drop-shadows under the cursors and menus). Fortunately, however, most of these things can be overridden. Nevertheless, I heartily approve of the NT-style Task Manager and the ability to apply ClearType smoothing to all screen fonts. And apart from the FireWire card, Setup correctly identified all of the hardware in my system and installed the proper drivers without any intervention from me.

And then I spent the next six hours reinstalling applications.