My Experience with Windows xp
I was without my iBook G4 for a few days last week, and of course my TiBook has no internet capabilities at all, so I was forced to go to a public library and use Windows XP w/ Office xp. Most of you are probably cringing right about now. I was going to be there for a while, so I set up prefs, added my email accounts to Outlook xp, and customized internet explorer to work like I wanted it to. After getting used to the command key not being beside the space bar but instead I had to use the ctrl key, I was doing pretty well with the beast. Of course I had to turn off the blue fisher-price version of the OS and revert to classic windows look.
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After the modifications, I enjoyed using it. I know this is something you dont talk about on a Mac website, but I really enjoyed using this computer. For one thing, when you replied to an email in Outlook, it opened an email style word document, and you can customize it how you please just like you are using words with even tables or images if you so choose. Outlook had resemblances of entourage but was a lot cleaner. I Loved the flat grey look of all of the OS windows. It looked a lot better than pinstriped windows of OSX, and setting up an email account was simple too. You just put in necessary information and click next. It was a lot less mind boggling then Mails one page of account information setup.
Using Internet Explorer was great too. It was not as fast as Safari, but having the Google toolbar was something I missed. Also, there were a lot more options and accessibility options than in Safari. One thing I did miss though is just clicking clear history in safari. In IE, you have to click internet options then clear history. I think the best thing though is the ability to play Real Media files and Windows Media files within Internet Explorer. Most of you know you have to download these files then open the program to play it on the Mac. It is in no way integrated.
So that was my experience with Windows. The machine was pretty fast. I experienced no hang-ups and speed problems. Windows xp never crashed or required me to force quit a process. I think xp has the stability to make it a usable OS. All it needs is expose and I might purchase an eMachine for some of my work.