Beware XP s Consumer Features

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Beware XP's Consumer Features

While consumer-like features built into XP Pro may not have any real business value, they could very well make XP popular among users and even some IT staff. After all, buying an operating system is a lot like buying a new car. Each year a new model comes out with new standard features that a person used to have to get from an aftermarket supplier. Stereos, air conditioning, seatbelts, GPS systems, cup holders, and even rear view mirrors are all third-party products that are now incorporated as standard equipment. Many sales-people can tell stories of cup holders being the decisive element in the sale of a $35,000 vehicle. It is the same with PCs. They now come with all sorts of bells and whistles built right into the operating system. XP, for example includes media players, CD burning software, firewalls, and a whole lot more.

The XP Windows Media Player

Windows Media Player (WMP) is now bundled with the operating system and is set to operate as the default player. OEMs can, however, make other arrangements. With WMP, users can play CDs and DVDs, watch analog and digital TV, create music disks, and listen to Internet radio through a single interface. With XP Pro, system administrators can lockdown the media player features to provide a consistent look, configuration, and feature set. Administrators can also use restrict functions and playback features for certain individuals or groups to save bandwidth.

The major criticism raised about WMP is that it works better with Microsoft's own media formats — Windows Media Audio (.wma) and Windows Media Video (WMV) — than it does with competing formats such as MP3 or QuickTime. A user can create an MP3 file with WMP, but only at 64 kbps. Microsoft promotes this lower baud rate as a feature, saying that it allows for faster CD burning and cuts down on storage. For higher audio quality, users need to purchase and install third-party software. WMP is, however, adequate for most business uses. Third-party software, such as RealOne Player, J. River's Media Jukebox, or Sonic Foundry's Siren Jukebox, lets users create MP3s at the higher quality 320 kbps, in addition to offering a more complete range of editing and copying functions. Those in the marketing or public relations departments might need better tools for creating content, but for most people in the company the question is whether they even need a media player. It may just prove to be an unnecessary distraction.

The XP CD Burner

When a user has compiled a music list with the Windows Media Player, it can be recorded onto a CD without buying additional software. Roxio, Inc. (Milpitas, California; spun off from Adaptec in 2001) has licensed portions of its Easy CD Creator technology to Microsoft. This tool has been incorporated into Windows Explorer, making it as easy to record files onto a CD as onto a floppy. The XP software, however, lacks the label-printing, audio enhancement, editing, and video CD creation features of the full Roxio software. The CD-burning application that comes with XP probably will not need to be replaced by any third-party software currently being sold, however. Most computers that come with CD-R or CD-RW also include basic CD burning software. Roxio's "lite" software, for example, has shipped with tens of millions of recorders from Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and others, bundled with the operating system. Typical business users have little need to create CDs, other than for occasional backups or to transfer files to a laptop, and for such users the XP CD burning software does the job. But, for those in IT, marketing, and public relations, who are more likely to require full functionality, an upgrade should be considered, such as Easy CD Creator 5 Platinum ($99.95) by Roxio (www.roxio.com).

The XP Defragger

Like Texas, everything is bigger about XP. That means bigger files, bigger disks, more memory, and a whole lot more trouble with fragmentation. High levels of fragmentation, in fact, manifest as soon as the operating system is installed. Right after I loaded XP, XP Office, and a couple of applications, I checked out the amount of fragmentation. The result shocked me. System files were badly splintered, making up 189 fragmented files in 559 pieces. Fragmented directories were also scattered all over the disk, severely restricting the availability of free space. If I had loaded something like SQL Server 2000 along with a large database at that point, it would not have found enough contiguous space to be written in one piece.

Fortunately, as the benefits of defragmentation have become better known in recent years, this technology has become an important performance addition for many networks. Microsoft, therefore, wisely added the built-in utility Disk Defragmenter to Windows 2000 and has added some minor upgrades to the XP version, targeted at greater thoroughness. Amended APIs for XP allow the MFT to be safely defragmented by Disk Defragmenter (in Windows 2000, Disk Defragmenter ignored MFT fragmentation, resulting in a gradual degradation in performance of the utility over time).

Although the new Disk Defragmenter is a little better than the previous version, it is still woefully inadequate for any type of enterprise application. According to recent tests by NSTL, the built-in utility is three to five times slower than a good third-party defragmenter and a whole lot less thorough. Paging file fragmentation, for instance, is not addressed by Disk Defragmenter. As a result, fragmented memory resources lead to sluggish reads and writes within a few months of enterprise usage. Even when Disk Defragmenter is run regularly, steadily worsening paging file fragmentation will impact system performance.

Disk Defragmenter is also found lacking as an administrative tool. A system administrator needs a robust scheduler to manage defragmentation on all machines throughout the network. The Microsoft defrag utility comes with an elementary scheduling script that is not adequate in an enterprise setting. In particular, the XP scheduler works only on XP boxes; therefore, any company containing a mix of Windows 9x, NT, 2000, and XP machines has to resort to SneakerNet, with the system administrator marching from box to box to manually defrag them one volume at a time. As this scenario is not likely to happen, the result will be a steady buildup of fragmentation across the network and significantly deteriorating performance due to neglect.

Even in XP-only enterprises, this scheduler is an administrative nightmare. The system administrator has to know the names of all systems and their volume configurations. Further, schedules have to be set blind; that is, the system administrator has to guess how long defragmentation will take on each machine and schedule it accordingly. If it takes longer for one volume to defrag than allocated, the process will shut off midway without notification, which means that any remaining volumes will also not be defragmented. And, as this utility runs only at high priority, in most sites it will have to be scheduled off-hours, but it takes far longer than a third-party tool to run and does not function at all on large disks, so it is largely useless in an enterprise setting.

A business of any size, then, requires the purchase of a third-party defragmenter for each workstation and server on the network. When it comes to Windows XP or 2000 tools that impact every file in the machine, it is important to deal only with reliable products. The Windows Certified Program is an effective tool for judging the quality of products, as it is based on stringent standards for reliability, scalability, and manageability. Executive Software offers networkable defragmentation software that is currently certified for Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Professional, as well as Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Try Diskeeper ($49.95 for workstation edition) by Executive Software (Burbank, California; www.execsoft.com). Other networkable defragmenters are offered by Ratco, Winternals, and O/O Software.

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