Gotta Love Windows XP

Before we move on to the rest of the book, I thought I'd share with you why I love Windows XP so much. It makes all my various jobs much easier; it even made writing this book easier than any book I've ever written.

For example, one of my favorite features is Remote Desktop. Before I got Windows XP, either I had to have several computers sitting on my desk to test instructions, dig around in the registry, take screen shots, and so on, or I had to walk back and forth between my lab and my office, which was a major productivity bust. For this book, I configured Remote Desktop on each Windows XP–based computer in my lab so I could connect to them from my production computer. That way, I could have two or three Remote Desktop connections open, each with a different experiment running. Remote Desktop reduced writing time by a huge amount. It also reduced the number of times that I was tempted to experiment on my production computer (which can result in a day of lost work because I trashed the computer's configuration). Remote Desktop was worth the cost of Windows XP alone.

And did I mention wireless networking? Windows XP enables me to get out of my office—in which I have 10 or so computers running, with the fan and hard drive noise that entails. Thanks to wireless networking, which Windows XP makes a no-brainer to configure, I could find a quiet place in my house to hide while I was writing this book. No fans. No noise. And even when I was hiding in the bedroom, I could still connect to the computers in my lab.

Regarding the registry itself, there are a few changes that struck me right away. First Microsoft got rid of the dueling registry editors. Windows 2000 had two editors: Regedit and Regedt32. Both had strengths and weakness, and you had no choice but to flip back and forth between each. Windows XP combines both editors into a single registry editor. Another new feature is Console Registry Tool for Windows (Reg). Windows XP includes this tool by default, whereas in Windows 2000 you had to install it from the support tools. This makes it a more viable tool for scripting registry edits using batch files. And it's free!