With all the Windows XP bashing it is very refreshing to hear people say they love Windows XP because it improves their lives. Windows XP improves my life in many wonderful ways. There are too many to express in this forum but I will spend some time to highlight a few.
The first is stability. Windows is rock solid stable. Something has to be very serious such as hardware failure for it to go down. The stability of Windows XP allows me to edit photos, design websites, write documents, surf the web and play games without worry of crashing. I can keep my system going months on end without a reboot. Now that is rock solid stability worthy of grand praise.
The second is software availability. The sole purpose of a computer is to run software. It can’t do a thing without code telling it what to do. Windows XP runs the largest assortment of software no matter what your needs are. If you want video editing, photo editing, web design, astronomy, gamming, desktop publishing and many other task there is great software for it. In fact Windows XP for all needs runs the most and best software for that task.
MP3 is the best thing since sliced bread. You can have near CD quality music at a very small file size. I have converted my whole CD collection to MP3. With a few quick mouse clicks I can listen to any song in my collection without swapping CDs. Windows runs a great program called Winamp and wow my Sound Blaster Audigy 2 and rockin Klipsch speakers mp3 rocks. Windows XP makes it very easy for me to take my music on the go. I simply plug in my iRiver hp-120 in the usb port and drag and drop my collection. Windows XP automatically detects it and I don’t have to spend all day downloading drivers from the net. It just works and works great.
One of my favorite hobbies is amateur astronomy. The other night I used my digital camera to capture a beautiful photo of the Milky Way in the Cygnus region. I plugged in my digital camera into the usb port and Windows XP detected it automatically without searching for drivers. I dragged and dropped the photo onto my hard drive. I then used PhotoShop CS to convert the raw image and bring the photo to its full glory.
I also like to use the program Skytools which only runs in Windows. It has changed my life in a profound way. It searches through a database of millions of celestial objects and tells me what I can see in my telescope for a given night. It even tells me what I have seen and displays a very detailed chart that helps me find it. You can see a review of Skytools here http://www.knoxvilleobservers.org/be...oolsreview.htm
I am an avid nature photographer. Windows XP is truly a wonderful OS for handling my precious photos. First Windows detects my camera without fuss and I can drag and drop my photos. Windows XP runs PhotoShop great. It is powerful in converting my raw images into tiff or jpeg. I can then optimize my images for the web or print. Many including myself have many 1000’s of images and we need help cataloging them. Windows runs a wide variety of image cataloging software which keeps track of photo collections. There is imatch, Portfolio, ACDsee, Thumbnails plus and many others. I like to use iMatch because it is cheap and reads my camera’s raw files. iMatch will even keep a thumbnail of my images after I put them on CD for safe keeping. Windows is so great it gives me choice in this matter.
How has Windows XP improved your life? I am very interested in hearing how much you like Windows XP.
