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Saturday,
August 11, 2001 Crazy day.
THE FOLLOWING IS NO LONGER APPLICABLE,
and should be regarded along with the add material at its end!
If you have a release candidate of Windows XP, my advice is DO NOT
"UPGRADE" to it. It requires you to reinstall every single
program, and many of them like Office have to be reinstalled ab initio:
the registry is all whacked up so that the programs cannot be made to run
simply by adding their startup to the task bar or start menu. This
may be an anti-piracy measure. What is is for me is a headache.
Imagine if this had been a working machine: I "upgrade" and
now I cannot access a legally installed copy of Word. I can't work
on my documents. I put in a phone call to my lawyers. Has
Microsoft lost its mind? But this is a release candidate and it may be an
error to be corrected in testing. All know is that my 'upgrade' made every
single application on my system inaccessible.
Worse, the path is gone: that is, Norton Commander won't work because
dll's in the System32 folder are not found. I have to move them to the
Norton Commander folder. I presume there is some place in here I can
adjust the path, but the help files don't know the word path at all.
Until they get this fixed, 'upgrades' to Windows XP should be done only
by those who know a lot more than I do, or who have lost their
minds. Just an opinion. Interestingly enough, earlier versions
of XP including one running on the machine I just "upgraded" did
not have this problem. The system had Windows 2000, was upgraded to
an earlier version of XP, and all the applications worked perfectly. I
then "upgraded" to the latest version of XP and this disaster
was the result. No installed programs were available, and putting
them in the start menu does no good because their dll's in SYSTEM32 folder
cannot be found. With OFFICE and some other Microsoft programs
it is worse than that: they just won't run, and a message pops up saying
they must be installed. Since this is an experimental machine I
don't care much, but if that were a working machine and I found I could
not longer run my legal copy of Word without installation from original
disks that I may have mislaid, I would be on the phone to lawyer's voice
mail for a Monday appointment.
Since this is a Release Candidate, perhaps this "feature"
will be removed before actual release. I certainly hope so.
MONDAY MORNING: AFTER CONSIDERABLE TIME
ON THE PHONE with Microsoft I find that this is about half my fault (using
unreleased software in a manner that, in a not very prominent instruction,
I was told not to do) and half Microsoft's (a specific bug in a particular
release candidate that will be fixed in the next release. SO: by
the time this is a released product this will not be a problem.
They have done something odd with what
used to be the path statement, and I am not all that happy with what they
have done, but that is a view with legitimate differences of opinion, and
it's not finalized yet anyway. As for the rest, it was in part my
fault, compounded by their eagerness to get me something fast so that I
didn't get the entire installation kit.
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