From TNPC issue #4.24...

eXPeriencing Windows XP: Part 2

by Al Gordon
November 29, 2001

To XP or not to XP, that is the question.

The pricing and product activation issues described in my previous article will be a deal breaker for a lot of users (as the email following that article made clear to me).
http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/424/tr.cgi?al4

If you get past that, then XP does offer Windows 9x and Millennium users a vastly more stable OS, while Windows 2000 users get much better application compatibility. But it is not absolutely certain that you can upgrade to XP. The OS is highly demanding of hardware resources and older PCs just won't run it. Generally, the clear rules of thumb are:

-- If your PC is less than a year old, upgrading to XP is no big deal. Just make sure that you have at least 256 MB of RAM.

-- If your PC is more than three years old or does not have at least a Pentium III 500, forget it. You won't be happy.

That, of course, leaves a wide range of iffy-ness. To look at some of the possibilities, The Naked PC Secret Testing Labs investigated the upgrade capabilities of its three-year-old Dell Dimension PIII/500 desktop. Dell Technical Support does not recommend upgrading it to XP.

In addition, the people at Dell were kind enough to loan me an Inspiron 8000 laptop. Special kudos go to Dell here because other companies declined to participate in upgrading tests, lest it be perceived that they were encouraging customers to upgrade old PCs rather than buy new ones. The Inspiron 8000 was chosen because it was being retired from the review fleet (it has been superseded by the 8100) and had not been designed with XP in mind. Accordingly, it was of the right vintage to test XP upgrading.

Kingston Technology provided the needed memory upgrade modules. I took the desktop to 512 MB and the notebook to 384 MB. Never having done a notebook memory upgrade before, I was leery about the potential difficulties. No problem. You simply take the battery and other slide-in modules out of the notebook, open up one panel and snap in the new module. It turned out to be easier than opening up a desktop and maneuvering to the memory slots on the motherboard.

The upshot of it all: the Inspiron, which has a 1 GHz PIII mobile processor, had no trouble with XP. The only major problem was some video flicker, which was easily resolved by a new video driver for XP from Dell's support Web site. All things considered, it looks as if the "no problem" window extends out to two-year-old units. With XP in place, the Inspiron gained formidable multimedia capabilities such as improved support for its combo DVD/CD-R/CD-RW drive and substantially improved multitasking.

The desktop was more problematic. There are times when XP clearly is taxing the hardware. Doubling the memory helped some, for example, when switching from one running application to another. But you can see a time lag in launching a new app when others already are running. And high-graphic displays, such as XP's more elaborate thumbnails for photos and art, can be painfully slow.

A processor and/or video card upgrade might improve things. But eventually you come to a point where you are spending more on hardware upgrades than makes sense.

You can reach Al Gordon at:
mailto:al@TheNakedPC.com

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