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by laumars 1677 days ago
Which utils?

I think XP introduced the “switch user” option. But I couldn’t find much in XP to justify the additional drain on memory and CPU. However I might not have needed the same utils you came to prefer (Every user is different).
2 comments
mixmastamyk 1677 days ago
Honestly, can't remember. Guessing I think it was the task manager and command prompt niceties. A few extra settings in the control panel.

The firewall appeared in SP2 right? Couldn't do without that today. And easy to set the GUI to classic mode.

Fortunately we had a corporate VLK copy so never had to worry about activation.

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laumars 1676 days ago
SP2 wasn’t released until 3 years into the life of XP. Windows 2000 would have been roughly 5 years old by that point and hardware would have caught up with XPs requirements somewhat so upgrading to XP was a more reasonable choice.

I was talking more about when XP was new.

The Command Prompt tweaks were a 2000 improvement IIRC but I do recall Task Manager and Control Panel receiving updates in the first edition of XP.

Not taking anything away from your core point though. There definitely were tweaks in the early releases of XP that many would have liked. It just wasn’t worth the extra CPU and memory footprint for me and by the time SP2 had arrived I’d switched to Linux full time so never bothered to upgrade from 2000.

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abeyer 1677 days ago
XP was the first that shipped the RDP server in the base... before that you pretty much needed to go up to one of the server SKUs of the OS, or buy third party remote access software. It also added a bunch of newer parts of 802.11 that were necessary for many wifi networks -- particularly corporate ones.
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laumars 1676 days ago
A lot of the WiFi improvements came in later service packs rather than the first edition.

I thought a Windows 2000 supported RDP? I’ve definitely RDPed onto 2000 servers. Was an RDP server not included in the ‘Professional Edition’? Or maybe I used VNC on those 2000 systems and forgotten it wasn’t RDP?

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abeyer 1673 days ago
Yeah, I don't think RDP was supported at all on the workstation sku (though it _could_ be made to work w/o support or a legal license) and I think may have been an additional license cost on the base server, then only included on advanced server.
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laumars 1673 days ago
I’d forgotten how annoying it was/is picking between all the different Microsoft releases of the same OS.
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