Welcome to the October 27, 2001 issue of Hewie's Favorites Views & Reviews. Be sure to visit Hewie's Favorites at http://www.hewie.net/. Please send this newsletter to your friends and ask them to subscribe at the site.

++ A good reason to be backed up
++ First Impressions of WindowsXP
++ Computer News at your finger tips

++ A good reason to be backed up

I went to the Microsoft launch of WindowsXP here in Orlando. I had seen some of XP and even did some testing of a couple of the beta versions. I have been hesitant to either recommend upgrading to it or trying to run it on an existing system. I have often stated that purchasing a new system should include XP.

Last weekend at our user group meeting, Gene Barlow did a great job of explaing about the latest Partition Magic version 7 and recommended creating an additional boot patrtion with WindowsXP, thus keeping Win98 intact.

I thought about doing that, but was opting to placing mobile racks, swapping hard drives and creating a new drive with WindowsXP. If you are unfamiliar with these racks, I will explain. There is a permanent shell and a removable drawer in which you place a hard drive. With the computer off, and that's extremely important, you can swap a drive with another easily.

As usual with anything computer related; nothing goes as planned. When I opened my computer to install 2 shells, the lower unit would not install because of part of the motherboard was in the way. I had to remove one of my CD drives and leave the lower slot empty.

I placed my C-drive and my D-drive in their respective bays and booted my computer and everything worked well. Whew! I took some other drives and placed them in additional racks for swapping. In all, I had my 20GB main drive, two 60GB drives, a 40GB and a 10GB drive.

I am not sure what I did, but in the swapping of the drives, I ended up scrambling the Windows folder and the My Documents folder of my main drive. Well, so much for using Windows98 on that drive for a while. Since I had to start from scratch anyway, I decided to install WindowsXP on one of the drives.

++ First Impressions of WindowsXP

The installation went smoothly. I was impressed that XP found my HP scanner and installed software to use it. The sound card and network cards were functioning. I had to install a driver for my camera's memory reader. The sound and network cards were working, as was my Alps printer. I was able to get to the Internet with my cable modem by merely opening Internet Explorer.

The system seems faster, but I give credit to not having all of the software and utilities installed and loaded that I had on my Windows98 installation. I copied a great deal of my data files from my original drive using Windows Explorer. I began to have some problems with both Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer. The error message is much friendlier than earlier Windows. The message said, "Windows Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

If you were in the middle of something, the information you were working on might be lost. Please tell Microsoft about this problem."

At this point you can read a detailed account of the problem and if you desire, send it to Microsoft. When you continue the problem program closed. Other programs continue to work. That was impressive, even though the problem should not be occurring.

Since I have gone this far, I also installed OfficeXP. I guess I like to live dangerously but need to get back to operating as normal on the system. In the crash of my main drive, I lost all of my email in Outlook and "My Favorites" list, which I had not backed up. I was able to sync my Palm unit with Outlook, thus saving my contact address list and my calendar.

My next task is to find all of my original disks and installing only the software that I use. For a while, at least, I will have a lean system. I am having some networking issues connecting with my other computers. That's my next project. I will keep you informed.

In summary, I am impressed with WindowsXP and glad I finally got to install OfficeXP. I had to go through the activation for OfficeXP, because everytime I opened Outlook or Word, it counted down from the 50 uses that it allows. It was a matter of clicking a button. The only information that was required was to list the area of the country that I live in. Other data was optional. I have 30 days to activate the WindowsXP.

++ Computer News at your finger tips

I found a great site for those of us who crave all of the computer news that we can get. Daily Rotation has quick loading headlines from 130 tech sites. You pick the sites and they snag the headlines for your choices and list them on one page. You click on a headline and it takes you to the article. If you right mouse-button on the headline, choose the "open in a new window" choice, the Daily Rotation sites stays in place. The site remembers your web site choices that you select by using cookies. If you have cookies turned on you will have your sites of interest loaded when you go to http://www.dailyrotation.com/.

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