A fresh Start
XP's new Start menu looks completely different, too. The two-column affair links to the usual desktop suspects: My Documents, My Computer, and program folders in the left panel and programs and documents in the right panel. The first time you run Windows XP, the Start menu lists a few preset Microsoft favorites, including Media Player, MSN Explorer, and Windows Movie Maker, with an additional link to your installed programs. As you run software, Windows adds your most recently used apps to the list and drops others as you go. If, however, you want a permanent link, you can right-click a program item to "pin" it to the Start menu. To access the rest of your programs, Windows XP provides an All Programs cascading menu that sorts programs and program folders alphabetically.

The new Start menu arrangement takes getting used to, but, with a little judicious rearrangement, you can quickly get your work space up to peak efficiency. You can still, for example, drag a favorite program or file from Explorer onto the Start button to put a shortcut into the Start menu, and there's nothing stopping you from dragging My Documents or My Computer from the Start menu to the desktop to make shortcuts.

Supersimple 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--dandy, 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. Nice. 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.

Under the hood
Under XP's prettier face, the new OS sports a set of godsends that Microsoft calls PC Health features, rewritten since their Windows Me introduction. In addition to a rollback feature called System Restore that takes XP's system state back to a previous date in the event of some catastrophic problem (akin to, but not as thorough as, Roxio GoBack), there's a driver rollback feature, too, that undoes disastrous driver upgrades.

XP's new Help And Support feature is easier to navigate. It features shorter topic lists that expand as you click them, instead of reams of task-driven help topics, and includes close links to the Microsoft Knowledge Base and online support, Windows Update, and other tools. We put three questions to three versions of Windows--Me, 2000, and XP--and found that XP's help was generally easier to understand, especially compared to Windows 2000's.

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 more of a concern for MP3 purists.

Ho-hum DVD; nifty Movie Maker
Sure, Media Player can play DVDs, but this feature is redundant at best, since Media Player can't actually decode DVDs. To play DVD movies, you still need an MPEG-2 decoder, which, in turn, means installing separate software such as PowerDVD. What's the point? Yes, Media Player's DVD playback dialog offers contrast and other display settings, but the playback quality is no great shakes.

The revamped Windows Movie Maker, on the other hand, is more valuable. This basic video-editing package debuted with Windows Me and, like the better alternative, Apple iMovie, it analyzes digital video (such as home recordings from a digital camera or downloaded clips from another source) and breaks them into scenes that you can edit into impressive little movies. Movie Maker stores your creations in compressed Windows Media (WMV) format that's often small enough to e-mail, depending on your ISP and bandwidth. The XP version also lets you record and edit uncompressed AVI movies at 720x480 resolution--good enough to play decent-looking, full-screen movies. And for those who like to watch movies on their iPaq handhelds, Movie Maker boasts new output profiles for playing videos on color PDAs--with, naturally, Windows Media Player for the Pocket PC.

Burn, baby...
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 disc 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 discs (such as those created by Roxio's DirectCD) is also confusing. Windows can read DirectCD-formatted discs, 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.

Fun with digital media
As Windows Me does, XP easily adds scanners and digital cameras to the list of disk drives and folders in My Computer. But XP organizes 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.

The bait to lure you to the Passport den is the new Windows Messenger--a beefy revamping of the wimpy MSN Messenger instant messenger. The new Messenger tool (not yet available as a separate download) lards serious conferencing tools on top of the regular, typed chat windows. Messenger adds two-way audio and video, application sharing (in which your chat buddy views and controls programs on your PC), and whiteboarding (the ability to share freehand drawings and other graphics). Messenger even integrates with Remote Assistance, a feature that lets you yield control of your system to a friend (with enough password protection and time limitations to allay any fear of hacking). Windows Messenger shares contact lists and a back-end network with MSN Messenger, but it doesn't work with Microsoft's existing conferencing software, NetMeeting.

Passport to .Net
If you choose to sign up for Messenger, Microsoft automatically equips you with a Passport account and its authentication, which you already have if you use Hotmail. Passport purports to let you move seamlessly into more of Microsoft's Web-based services and partners. It automatically logs you on to partner sites, such as Hotmail, MSN.com, and many more. Gosh, the whole Internet is like one big Microsoft site! The ultimate goal of Passport is to have you create a wallet that stores your credit card information, and billing and shipping addresses, much like Amazon.com's one-click purchasing.

If this all sounds too Big Brother-ish, then Windows XP is probably not the operating system for you. You don't actually have to give up much information to have a Passport, though, and you don't have to put your credit card info in a Passport account either. But Passport itself plays a crucial role in Microsoft's much-discussed .Net strategy, and links to online services are all over XP. Every Windows Explorer window, for instance, includes a link for publishing its contents to the Web. Click it, and you can send files to MSN Communities or Xdrive, using Passport authentication. Plug in a digital camera, and a wizard offers to publish pictures to a Web site or send them to partner photo developers such as Kodak and Fuji.

This type of online integration is handy if you adore all destinations Microsoft, but it's stifling. We prefer the ability to choose our own FTP or Web sites to upload files to instead of being forced to use Microsoft's limited choices, for example. Open source advocates and the competition are screaming bloody murder about such Net domination.

A sense of security
Worried about hackers? You're smart, not paranoid. Automated scripts constantly probe computers on the Internet for back doors, and Windows XP is doing something about it. As a nod to security, Windows XP features a software firewall to block stealthy hack attacks on your network connections, dial-up and broadband alike. XP's Internet Connection Firewall makes your PC invisible while you're on the Net, though it won't stop hackers from sending you viruses over e-mail or through a hacked Web site. Enable the firewall at the Networking control panel for each of your possible connections. (If you have an AOL and a separate broadband connection, for example, you must turn on the firewall for both; otherwise, you'll leave one connection open--and it's not on by default.)

We tested the firewall by visiting Gibson Research's site, which tests computer ports for vulnerabilities by using ShieldsUp and a variety of other security-probing Web programs. The results were encouraging. The site detected the IP address of our test system (not unusual even with hardware firewall products), but XP also stealthed, or completely hid, all of our networking ports. By concealing these virtual back doors, XP's firewall prevented most forms of script-based hack attacks--and more power to Microsoft for providing the tool. Its blocking ability matched that of a hardware firewall on our test machine (Sohoware BroadGuard) and software firewalls from Norton and Zone Labs, although it did not keep a log of hack attempts as ZoneAlarm does. So does it replace these third-party options? No, not really, but if you don't have them installed, it's nice to have this option already in your operating system.

On our test systems, Upgrade Advisor flagged several common programs as potentially incompatible (including Roxio DirectCD, Norton AntiVirus, Logitech Mouseware, MusicMatch Jukebox, and Norton SystemWorks), and recommended uninstalling some of them. There were fewer hardware issues, but it flagged the aforementioned Lexmark MFD as well as some modems and older monitors. Some turned out to be false alarms, since the hardware worked fine after installation. However, take the Upgrade Advisor's recommendations seriously. We suffered some hideous crashes that we eventually traced to an older version of DirectCD software--which Upgrade Advisor flagged and we kept anyway--that clashed with XP.

Incompatible software? No problem
Software compatibility is a tricky beast, but Microsoft's Compatibility Mode overcomes some of these issues. If a program refuses to run under XP, right-click its icon and select Properties and the Compatibility tab. There, you can choose an operating system to emulate--one that you think the software would run on (Windows 95/98/Me/NT 4.0/2000). Compatibility Mode also offers 256-color mode and 640x480-pixel screen resolution. Once you've set the mode that you think will work, XP keeps track of the settings and runs the program in that mode the next time around. We tested this feature with some old CD-ROM titles from the early 1990s, including some first-release Living Books and corporate databases. The feature worked fine for us.

Alas, XP's DOS virtual machine is less successful, so popular, older DOS games or Windows 3.1 programs that use DOS programming tricks may cause problems. Descent II, for example, won't even install because XP won't let the setup program probe the system for a sound card.

Beefy Professional security
You'll find even more differences under the surface of these two editions. Professional Edition offers extra features that will appeal to those upgrading from Windows 2000 Professional--mostly administrator features and security options crucial for corporate setups.

These administrative features include about 300 new administrative and group policies (new since Windows 2000 Professional), including one that lets system administrators redirect the contents of My Documents to a network server for security and backup. XP Pro boasts roaming user profiling; you can sit at any computer on your company's local area network and log on to your personal system settings, with access to all of your settings and documents.

In the security arena, XP Professional includes the Encrypting File System for disguising sensitive data. This feature, introduced in Windows 2000 Professional, lets NTFS-based disks scramble data stored on their hard disks for added security--a big plus for laptop users who dread losing trade secrets if their laptops get hijacked.

Remote control and access
XP Pro provides two remote control programs that allow you to control your PC from another Web-enabled PC. If you're having system trouble, Remote Assistant lets tech-savvy friends or support folks fix your system with a minimum of fuss. The Assistant sends e-mail with a link that lets your friend remotely connect to your PC. The link is designed to work on a case-by-case basis (it's tied to the recipient of your e-mail link and expires quickly) so that this feature doesn't create a permanent back door into your PC. This is a strength and a weakness, since you'll need to resend a link if your tech buddy can't help you right away.

The second app is Remote Desktop, which provides remote control similar to pcAnywhere's or GoToMyPC's. This underrated feature is the most compelling lure for small-business users to consider using Professional Edition; it's a boon for anyone who's on the road or doing a little weekend work from home. Note: If you have XP Home, you can use Remote Desktop to connect a PC running XP Professional (in other words, you can dial up work from home), but you can't do the opposite.