[impressions]

October 15, 2002

First impression: I am extremely happy that I have friends who have *gone before* with WindowsXP. Special thanks to Val, the instructor of the intro to WindowsXP class at LVS Online, Becky who is a never ending source of ideas on all things computer related (and a few nutty things as well ;-) and debbieT for her words of encouragement and suggestion of *the* book to buy. It's ordered.

Next, it fires up. EWWWW! What is this electric blue bubbly stuff? I am not a fan of this desktop look. I had heard somewhere that there was a way to get the classic edges. Blue and gray that looks so familiar. Went in search of that change...after I had gotten setup with an online connection of course. [grin]

Found a couple of methods. One is in the good old familiar place from Win98:
Start->Control Panel->Display->Themes->Windows Classic. While I was there, I swapped my desktop over to a photo from my own collection. Had to pick a color to give it a border for now as it was sized for a 1024x768 resolution and I now am running higher most of the time with the new flat screen. 800x600 and 1024x768 look pretty icky on this screen compared to the default 1280x1024. So I will be surfing there most of the time and reserve the lower resolutions for checking my pages. I've since spotted some old ones in dire need of a "fix" for higher resolution which have been added to my "to do" list. Warning: With higher resolutions becoming more common in new systems, watch those big backgrounds or bordered backgrounds that have a set width. They are tiling and repeating here...ugh! Luckily, I haven't used many of those. They don't all size up well.

Right click on the Start button will pull up the properties box and it allows you to use the XP menu or Classic version. I opted to stay in XP to give it a fair try.

I wasn't expecting to need to be logged in as an administrator to add hardware and software, so there was a bit of a frantic time when things were not working as expected. I am used to being a single user & was not thinking in that direction. Somehow I had managed to log myself in a guest with no privileges so I was hitting a brick wall on some installations. Until the *buds* thought of the fact that I might not have been forewarned.

There was also the slight inconvenience of realizing the USB ports had not been enabled. A trip online to find the exact spot in the bios that needed a change fixed that.

Mostly the things that were bugging me are ironing themselves out. The one thing that still seems irritating to me is that things take extra clicks to get where I want to be. I may be making a royal mess of things by placing a lot of my personal files up on the C:\ directory rather than down in Documents & Settings, My Pictures, etc. but that can be easily changed if there is a reason later. For now, I like them where they are.

I was worrying about available drivers for some of my hardware and issues with non-compatible software. I did not have any trouble with that part that was not self inflicted. It seems that the different vendors, for the most part, have had time to readjust to XP's differences.

With life going on here at the cathouse, I have not yet had time to delve deeply into XP, but plan to keep poking and picking. I will post any notes I feel might be of interest to someone else starting out with XP or things that I want to remember here in the future.

Tweaks & Tips sections that follow will give you some of the little fixes I have found for day to day things.