I just got my copy of Windows XP Pro today and had a little play with it. The installation was completed on my system in under 40 Mins (Windows 2000 Pro 45 mins) and once completed I was greeted by a flashy intro. Afterwards I began playing with - what to me looks likes a kiddies OS - and found that part of Direct X that comes with the OSand part of it is still beta. I found it by running the DXDIAG from the run command on the start menu, selected the tab to see what Direct X files were installed and came across this little suprise. The mfc42.dll is still a beta file. The others all say final retail but this one say beta retail. So what is M$ up to? I remembered the well known fact that appeared in Windows ME in XP. In Windows ME Microsoft gave us a beta version of Internet Explorer 5.5. In Windows XP this might be partly true. I ran the IE6 install, which if it was the final version would report that I have the latest version of IE installed, but this wasn't true. It ran the process as if IE6 hadn't been installed. Well I'm not sure what was installed with it as it doesn't report what it will be installing but this seemed kind of weird too.

Written by Louis Green