Raising a sweat on the upgrade treadmill

By CHRIS BARTON

The pain struck at breakfast - like someone driving a spike into my temple. It was unmistakable and depressingly familiar - the upgrade headache.

Subscribing to the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" school of PC maintenance, I had procrastinated all week about the move to Windows XP.

My Windows 2000 machine was working just fine, thank you. For about a year it's been the most stable Windows platform I've had - not one crash. Now I was going to spoil everything.

The piercing of my head was giving the clearest of signals - don't do it. So it was with a heavy heart and dulled by pain medication that I pulled the shiny, holograph-emblazoned Windows XP CD-Rom from its packaging. Why?

Because it's my job. Because I wanted to try some of the new features. Because, with PCs, there's no escaping the upgrade treadmill. Bigger, better, faster ...

Actually, there were a couple of XP features I was particularly keen on. The software's ability to create different "accounts" on the one PC sounded good. I'm driven insane by my daughter's penchant for changing the PC desktop to display cute furry animals. With XP she can have the computer the way she wants and so can I. The security features mean she's also kept well clear of my document archive - so she can't accidentally mess with it.

The installation went smoothly enough. Pop in the disk and follow the instructions. It took 51 minutes and alerted me to three compatibility problems - with Norton AntiVirus, DirectCD and ZoneAlarm.

It's good the software gave these warnings - plus links to websites and more information. But it's also the sort of problem that gives upgrading a bad name - and creates headaches.

In my case the suffering lasted three days - and took hours of frustrating fiddling with computer settings. Even then the outcome is not entirely satisfactory.

Norton AntiVirus was the easiest. Visit the web site listed (www.symantec.com/techsupp/files/symevnt/symevnt.html) - download the new patch, install and, eureka, the annoying "Unable to start SymEvent" message goes away. But why? I'm using Norton AntiVirus 2001 set to automatic updates. Surely the darn thing should be able to fix this automatically.

The ZoneAlarm firewall glitch was more vexing. After downloading and installing the new XP compatible version, the firewall still wouldn't work - raising suspicions this was a Microsoft tactic to make me use the less functional firewall built in to XP. Funny, too, how Microsoft has bundled its CD burner software into XP. DirectCD, part of my Adaptec CD burner software, wouldn't work either.

The issue of bundling or integrating applications with the Windows operating system is central to the United States antitrust case against Microsoft, where the tying of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser software to Windows 95 has yet to be resolved.

But the debate about whether the practice is anti-competitive continues with XP and has many calling for the US Department of Justice to take a closer look at XP's many bundled applications.

With ZoneAlarm - a product that's served me well in keeping out internet nasties - the incompatibility seems more related to the timing of my installation, rather than some Microsoft plot.

Users have to ensure something called TrueVector Services is not running when installing the XP-compatible ZoneAlarm - not as simple as just shutting the firewall down. For those who need to know, the answers can be found here - www.zonelabs.com/services/support_install.htm.

The fault is clearly with ZoneAlarm - and some simple instructions attached to the XP version could have avoided a lot of grief. But one can also argue that the more complicated it gets to install another vendor's software, the better it is for Microsoft.

I suspect many PC users facing the ZoneAlarm complications would have just given up. That's pretty much what I did with DirectCD.

Frustrated with a persistent error message - "The application failed to initialise properly" - I eventually uninstalled the software. That was after learning Easy Creator CD 4.x is not supported under Windows XP (www.roxio.com/en/support/) but that I could buy an XP-compatible upgrade. For now that's left me using Microsoft's less functional built-in CD burner.

There was an issue, too, with my InterVideo WinDVD player, which wouldn't work under XP. I finally got it to run using the Windows 2000 compatibility settings, but it takes an epoch to load - whereas Microsoft's Windows Media Player loads in a flash. The result? I'll probably end up using Media Player.

So is this an anti-competitive Microsoft tactic to gain market share by creating compatibility mayhem? The conspiracy theorists will say absolutely. But those who have been here before know this is just how it is in a Microsoft upgrade world.

* Next week: ZoneAlarm goes bananas - life with XP.

* Tell me about your XPerience: chris_barton@nzherald.co.nz