An Overview of Windows XP Professional

Windows XP Professional is the successor to Windows 2000 Professional, and takes its place as the corporate desktop and workstation version of Windows for the early 21st century. However, Windows XP Professional also is part of the first family of Windows to break down the long-standing barrier between home-oriented and business-oriented releases of Windows. The release of Windows XP in Home and Professional versions is a big move for Microsoft, which has offered separate home-oriented (Windows 3.x/9x/Me) and corporate-oriented (Windows NT/2000) versions with drastically different internal designs since 1993. The common code base of both versions of Windows XP also is a big benefit for both users and developers. It makes program and device driver development much easier, because device drivers and software programs need to be created just once, rather than twice.

The goal that Microsoft had in mind for Windows XP Professional was ambitious: to create a reliable, easy-to-use operating system whose features would provide complete corporate network and security features, while also including features popular with users who might have previously used Windows 9x or Windows Me. Windows XP Professional also is designed to provide application and hardware compatibility with products made for older versions of Windows, and even MS-DOS game and graphics applications.

It's a tough job, but Windows XP Professional meets these requirements quite well. Windows XP Professional combines the reliability and corporate networking/security features of Windows 2000 with improved versions of the multimedia and crash-recovery features that Windows 98 and Windows Me pioneered. To make it easier to move to Windows XP Professional, it's designed to work much better than Windows 2000 did with older Windows (and even DOS-based) software, while still supporting the latest productivity, educational, recreational, and gaming programs from Microsoft and other publishers.

What does the "XP" in Windows XP stand for? "Experience," and you will find that using Windows XP Professional will feel like a new experience thanks to its new Luna user interface. And, beneath the surface, there's a mixture of the new, the enhanced, and the tried-and-true features brought over from both Windows 2000 and Windows 9x/Me.

Originally code-named Whistler, Windows XP is the product of a development process that began with a consumer operating system code-named Neptune in late 1999 and a separate business-oriented operating system code-named Odyssey, which was planned as a successor to Windows 2000. In January 2000, Microsoft decided to integrate both Neptune and Odyssey into a single operating system family code-named Whistler, which you now know as Windows XP.

Windows XP has been in the public eye longer than any other Windows version during its development process, and the final product has received a great deal of user feedback, thanks to its unprecedented public beta-testing process. Although some pundits derided Microsoft for charging users for the "privilege" of using a beta product, the decision to allow users to try beta versions with the Windows XP Preview Program, starting in April 2001, has helped make Windows XP a better product. The public scrutiny of Windows XP has forced controversial features such as Smart Tags (which added Microsoft-generated URLs to Web pages) to be dropped and others such as Hardware Activation (required before Windows XP can be used for the first time) to be modified in the favor of users.