Stardate 20031116.1533

(Captain's log): I think there are some people who have come to the conclusion that I'm some sort of Microsoft fanboy, based on what I've written about other platforms here and in other fora. I'd like to disabuse you of that notion right now.

There's a lot of computing hardware in this place, much of which hasn't been turned on in months or even years. There are three main computers which get used a lot. There's my laptop, an HP Pavilion known as Spica.

There's a Cobalt Qube 3 server appliance called Regulus which runs Linux and Apache and which hosts this web site, and also serves as firewall for my LAN, and lets me access the web via NAT.

The main bridge computer here at USS Clueless is an HP Workstation X4000, with dual 2.4 GHz Xeons and 1G of RAM, and it is called Draconis. I had a choice of operating systems when I bought it, and it came preloaded, but I wanted to try both Win2K and WinXP on it, to compare them, and eventually settled on Win2K, which I installed clean using a CD from Microsoft rather than the HP disks which came from it.

Win2K worked well, and was pretty clean. On the other hand, it predates the Xeon and doesn't really support hyperthreading, Intel's technology which makes its CPUs look like a CPU-and-a-half; like two CPUs which don't really execute as fast as two real ones would. Win2K supported the dual CPUs but only as two CPUs. When I enabled hyperthreading in the BIOS, Win2K Workstation ignored it, because it's limited by license to two total CPUs, and didn't recognize the "third" and "fourth" ones as actually being part of the two which are actually present. In order to use hyperthreading I'd have needed the server version of Win2K, and it still wouldn't work correctly. (With two hyperthreading-enabled CPUs, the OS task scheduler needs to know that hyperthreading is going on so that it doesn't stick CPU-bound tasks in both halves of the same CPU while the other is idle. Win2K server would see four CPUs and treat them as if they were completely independent.)

I confess that this grated. The idea that there was a lot of hardware power I'd paid good money for that I could not use was unpalatable, even if I really didn't have any need for it. But based on what I'd read about XP, and on my limited experience when I was testing it as an alternative to Win2K, I was worried about XP's use experience.

The problem was that Microsoft had Macified XP by comparison to Win2K. They'd tried to make it "beautiful"; they'd tried to make it "helpful". Partly that was to distinguish it from Win2K, but the biggest reason is that they were trying to make XP accessible to laymen, so that they could finally lay Windows to a well-deserved rest. The NT project was originally started at Microsoft because it was recognized that the foundations of DOS and Windows were fatally flawed architecturally, and Gates knew that a modern reliable OS could only be created by starting over. NT evolved into Win2K, and was marketed primarily to business and engineering customers, while Win95/98 dominated the consumer sector (and was also used quite a lot by business customers), but the long term plan had always been to eventually create a consumer-friendly OS in the NT line, and then to shut down Windows entirely.

Problem for me is that a lot of what they put in just got in my way. They also apparently had removed some things I did want. In particular, on the previous computer using Win2K I had done most of my work with an account which was classified as "power user", which didn't have all the capabilities of an administrator but was much less constrained than a normal user. But XP's account manager was vastly simplified, and didn't offer me that choice.

There's a good reason for doing that, by the way. As a power user certain critical OS features and files are locked up. It means I can't delete them or damage them when I make a stupid mistake (and I've made more than my share of stupid mistakes over the years), and even more important it means that a program I'm running can't alter them even if it wants to. When I need to do things requiring full privilege, I log in as Administrator. That's how I install drivers, install programs, and run Windows Update. But for normal use, I want that security in place to protect the core of the OS from cockpit errors, application bugs – and deliberately inimical programs. I'm cautious about what I run, but you never know.

For me, the privileges associated with XP's normal user account were far too restrictive, but the only other choice seemed to be to run as an administrator, which I didn't really like. That was probably the biggest reason I ended up going with Win2K.

But there were a few things I really couldn't do with Win2K that I wanted, and as long as I continued to use Win2K I couldn't use all the hardware I'd bought.

I had XP installed on Spica, my laptop, and had been using it there. I didn't have any choice. It came with "XP Home" preinstalled. That version of XP doesn't have accounts at all; it effectively is always logged in as Administrator. It's also cut down in other ways, and I never considered staying with it. I tried installing Win2K Workstation on it and discovered that there were no Win2K drivers for some of the hardware. So I eventually installed XP Workstation on it, and initially accepted that I'd have to run as administrator.