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Guy Kewney: XP and me

Guy Kewney AnchorDesk

Published: 18 Sep 2001 11:47 BST

In your search for someone who is actually going to install Windows XP on the day they launch it, you have just struck Gold. It's me.

Right now, as I write this, I honestly have no idea whether I'm going to be glad, or sorry, when I do. I have a shameful secret: I possess software which is not written to run under Windows 2000. It runs either on Windows ninety-something (Win 9X, as the experts say) or it runs under Windows NT 4.0 SP4 - but not under Win2K.

I bought this software for professional reasons; my wife teaches dyslexic children, and it's the Dyslexia Institute's own "Units of Sound" package. And I wasted a weekend trying to get it working before finding the small print which told me I needn't have bothered. When I rang the developers, they said they had "plans" to produce a Win2K version, but had "no idea when."

Now, I have good reasons for running Windows 2000. First, I have a notebook. It's a very, very nice ThinkPad X20, easily the nicest notebook I've had since my last (ageing) Toshiba Portege. It's quick, it has a lovely display, and it has almost no old-fashioned serial ports, parallel ports, infra-red ports and the like; just USB.

Because it has to be stable, and tolerate being closed down suddenly into "standby" mode, it needs something more stable than Windows 98. Oh, it runs Windows 98 just fine! - but the OS simply isn't stable enough; and after I'd had the machine for a month, it got itself so badly corrupted that the disk became unreadable. IBM said: "Switch to Win2K" and I have. And it works just fine.