Old Versus New: How to Do What You Used to Do


Everything you used to do with Windows 98 or Windows Me, you can still do with Windows XP. In fact, in most instances you can still perform the same tasks the same way. Windows XP, more often than not, just provides a more efficient way to accomplish your familiar tasks.

This is most apparent when you're working with files and folders. Because all Windows XP folders include an activity center pane, you can use the links on this pane to accomplish your most frequent file management tasks.

Doing It All from a Single Folder

With previous versions of Windows, if you wanted to perform some action on a file, you'd have to pull down the Edit menu or right-click the file to access the pop-up menu. (Most users didn't know about the right-click menus one of the more productive "hidden" features in Windows 98 and Windows Me.) Now all those right-click options are out in the open, in the activity center's Tasks list.

You might be used to dragging and dropping file icons, or pulling down the Edit menu, or right-clicking. Using the Tasks list is a much faster way to get most things done. You have to get used to some new wording, but when the task is right in front of you like that, it really speeds up things.

In fact, XP really makes a big shift away from the old "drag-and-drop" paradigm. Although XP is still very much mouse-driven, the new paradigm is "select and do." Everything you need to do appears in a single window, so all you have to do is select a file and then choose what you want to do with no interim menu pulling to get in the way.

The other big change with Windows XP is that you probably, at last, end up abandoning the directory-tree way of doing things, typified by the old Windows Explorer. I've never been a big fan of Windows Explorer, but most power users I know lived inside Explorer, because of its powerful tree view. Well, with Windows XP's new folder views and the creation of the extremely useful activity centers, Windows Explorer has been eliminated. That's right, no more Windows Explorer. Get used to it!

The bottom line is that Windows XP makes a lot of tasks a lot easier than they used to be. You don't have to change the way you do things right-clicking still opens the old pop-up menu but all the shortcuts and work arounds that Windows power users taught themselves over the years no longer give them any advantage.

In other words, Microsoft finally got it mostly right.

Taking Advantage of the New Utilities

Microsoft also included a handful of new system tools and utilities in Windows XP. These built-in utilities make it easier to do common tasks within Windows, without reverting to third-party programs.

To me, chief among these new utilities is the Extraction Wizard. Over the years I got very used to launching WinZip whenever I needed to compress some files even after compressed folders were introduced in the Windows 98 Plus! Pack. The Extraction Wizard, however, finally makes compressed folders as easy to use as WinZip, so I don't use the WinZip utility any more. It saves me a little time, and it's more convenient.

Depending on your particular needs, you might say the same thing about XP's integrated folder-to-CD-R/RW file copying, or Windows Media Player's ripping and burning, or the online photo finishing feature, or the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. More and more common operations are built into the operating system, which reduces the number of application-specific utility programs you need to run. True, some of these XP utilities don't include all the features you might find in a third-party program, but not all users need all those features. You can still use third-party utilities if you like, but you might not need to.

Where Things Are

TIP

Depending on your setup, username might be your user name, or it might be "default" or "default user."


One last thing about Windows XP: If you go looking for certain files on your hard disk, you find that the location of some important files and folders are different from where they were in previous versions of Windows.

The biggest change is where Windows stores your documents. In Windows 9X/Me, your documents were stored in the My Documents folder, which was one level down from the root directory. In Windows XP, such as in Windows 2000, each user has his own My Documents folder, which is stored several levels down. You find the My Documents folder in the following location: c:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\. Within the My Documents folder are the My Music, My Pictures, My Videos, and My Webs subfolders.

Your Favorites folder is also located within the c:\Documents and Settings\username\folder. Most templates and configuration files for Microsoft applications (such as Office) have been moved to subfolders within the c:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\ folder.

In short, look for any user-specific files to be somewhere in the folder with your name on it.



Microsoft Windows XP for Home Users Service Pack
Windows XP for Home Users, Service Pack 2 Edition
ISBN: 0321369890
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 270

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