Introduction

In the beginning, computers were the size of entire rooms.  They could only do minor mundane tasks, like play Tic-Tac-Toe.  The right of passage, or access to these, was reserved for the highly intelligent that could attend a college that had one of these pieces of humankind’s genius.  To remove a “bug” from their computers, the technicians had to crawl through the circuitry to find where some little bug had eaten though a small cable and fried the system.  But frankly, at the time, no one really cared about computers.  They were the play toys of nerds and couldn’t even communicate with each other.  Little did we know what was in store for us when the technology was born?

Let’s move to 1975.  Bill Gates drops out of Harvard and, with Paul Allen, starts a little company called Microsoft with the hopes that everyone will one day have a computer on their desktop.  Fast-forward again to today, 2001.  Windows XP debuts and the realization of Bill Gates’ dream has finally hit – in a bigger way than any could have expected.  Sure, the basic dream of everyone owning their own desktop has been realized for a while now.  But XP will empower EVERYONE to take advantage of their computer like never before.  Integration between devices is something that Microsoft has believed was necessary for quite some time now.  I saw the direction that Microsoft was making early last year when I began testing the Windows CE devices that Microsoft were then debuting, with partners like HP, along with the Internet capabilities of Exchange 2000 (Beta 3) and the add-on that they released for SQL 7 that added XML capabilities into their Enterprise level Database server application.  Now it is so clear with XP where everything is headed.

Well, it’s been a while since Beta 2.  Microsoft has made some improvements that are sure to dazzle you in this Pre-release.  I am going to show you a lot of the enhancements and “neat things” that have been added, or slightly modified.  Now I have been watching this thing grow since Beta 2 and let me tell you, Media Player is cool.  The logon screen has some neat special effects, Group Policy has been slightly modified (We’ll talk more about that later), some of the network troubleshooting that I loved so much has been removed, and there are tons of improvements for application support.  Assisting your friends has become much easier through .Net.