Should You Set Your Sights on Windows XP

Super simple search
Also in the Start menu, XP renames the Windows 95/98 Find feature Search (as it's called in Windows Me). The new version, thankfully, has evolved. Those who understand wildcard searching can still use it, but Search serves up many new hand-holding tricks. It asks a question ("What do you want to search for?") and lets you search under plain-English categories such as "Pictures, music, or video" and "Documents (Word, Excel, etc.)". And you can now search the Web using the Start menu's search form, too-great, although the default engine is MSN Search. Happily, you can change the default engine to one of a fistful of options, including Google, Yahoo, AskJeeves, Excite, and more. For real technophobes, Microsoft also throws in a cartoon doggie to wag its tail underneath the search box, but lets you switch it off, thankfully.

Digital media
XP has a new name for what we used to call multimedia: digital media. Indeed, XP handles all kinds of digital media, including video, still pictures, and music, with aplomb previously lacking in Microsoft operating systems. XP even has native support for burning CD-Rs and writing to RW disks, and it works better with removable devices in general.

Autoplay it again
Windows XP boasts a vastly improved autoplay capability. First introduced in Windows 95, autoplay automatically launched audio CDs and CD-ROM titles when they were loaded into the drive. As soon as XP determines the media type or source, be it a digital camera or a blank CD-R, it pops up a dialog box listing the appropriate, associated programs, such as a DVD player or an editing app. Make the appropriate selection, and Windows XP loads it. Check off the option, and XP will repeat the action every time you load that media. Best of all, Windows maintains control over autoplay.

Playing sounds
The revamped Windows Media Player for Windows XP looks and works better than previous versions, though it won't rip to MP3 format without a third-party add-on (one that you need to buy separately-an unpopular idea indeed!). You can add lyrics to Windows Media Audio (WMA) and MP3 files using standard ID3, or metadata, tags, and display CD album art as you play tracks. Unfortunately, Media Player relies on AMG for the track listings. Rival Gracenote's CDDB, which is favoured by other jukebox software, offers more complete and accurate data.

Better yet, Media Player finally supports CD burning on PCs with CD-R/RW drives. To burn a CD, just click the "Copy to CD or portable device" tab and import a playlist. Alternatively, select WMA, MP3, or WAV files in Explorer and select the Record To CD option, which opens Media Player's CD recording screen. Notable improvements, but you still can't rip audio tracks from CDs in MP3 format. Instead, you have to pay for a third-party plug-in. Until the plug-in arrives, you're stuck with Microsoft's own WMA format. WMA files sound better to our ears than MP3s at a similar rate of compression, so this is more of a concern for MP3 purists.

Burn speed
XP's built-in CD burner is a big plus and eliminates the need for third-party packages such as Easy CD Creator-if you have simple CD-burning desires. But it won't design jewel case inserts and disk labels, for example, and the wizard hides certain settings, such as those for controlling your drive's burn speed, but you can change the speed by using Windows Explorer. And its handling of UDF-formatted RW disks (such as those created by Roxio's DirectCD) is also confusing. Windows can read DirectCD-formatted disks, but it can't write data to them. In other words, you must reformat DirectCD-formatted RWs to add data to them under Windows XP.

More "digital media" features
XP easily adds scanners and digital cameras to the list of disk drives and folders in My Computer. But XP organises and stores photos more efficiently than its predecessor. Plug in your camera, and XP launches a wizard that helps you move pictures from the camera onto your hard drive. To get images from scanners, you have to launch the wizard manually and acquire images one by one, but the wizard provides the same image-manipulation functions. It lets you rotate and position photos, download them to your hard drive, upload them to the Internet, or delete them from the camera with a single command. It's the very soul of simplicity. But if you're comfortable with your old TWAIN software, you don't have to abandon it; this wizard just gives you more options.

XP's redesigned My Pictures folder kicks a little posterior, too. Turn on the Thumbnail view in the View menu, and even folder icons display thumbnails of photos within. You'll see up to four thumbnails on any My Pictures subfolder that contains graphics. You can also order prints of any graphic directly from within the folder via a link to one of Microsoft's online photo-printing service partners (currently, Kodak and Fuji). Frankly, this feature is superfluous, unless you're collecting referral dollars as Microsoft undoubtedly is, but some people will find it useful.

XP numbers your graphics sequentially as they land on your hard drive to ensure that you don't overwrite any pics, and the wizard cuts down on duplicates by letting you know if you've already copied a picture from your camera. Printing graphics is also considerably easier, as the Photo Printing wizard lets you select any pictures you want in hard copy and send the job off in a batch.