Windows XP on the move

For the mobile user, Windows has always been a big headache. While Windows 9x and NT have performed fairly well on a stationary device such as a desktop PC, both fall to pieces when faced with a laptop and its mountain of PC card adaptors, external and interchangeable drives and no sense of where it has to connect to or dial into next.

The constant swapping of devices and reloading of drivers that this requires has played havoc with Windows. Only Windows 2000 has managed to even partly address the problem, along with the added element of coping with multiple network and dial-up connection settings.

Peripheral management on a mobile machine is a problem. The addition of the installed driver database in Windows 2000 means that NT users no longer need to carry their operating system CD to reinstall a dropped driver after the removal and reinsertion of a PC card, or modular device such as a CDRom drive.

The user is still plagued by the 'surprise removal' warning under Windows 2000 - when a device is removed from a computer without disabling it in Windows Device Manager - which slows down productivity. With Windows XP, you will no longer see a pop-up message on surprise removal of hardware devices or docking units.

The read/write cacheing policy has also undergone some surgery. Removable storage devices (USB, Flash, FireWire devices and so on) no longer require data cacheing. Disabling write cacheing means that, instead of saving up changes for a file on a removable storage device and then doing a bulk write, Windows XP writes changes to the file as the changes are made.

This eliminates many problems on removal of a device, particularly slower items such as USB storage drives, where a concluding write to a disk can take several seconds after the machine has finished and create havoc when a user tries to disconnect. The machine crashes as it tries to return to a drive which is no longer present.

The price of this is performance, with data transfer rates falling as a result of no cache buffer. The feature can be reactivated manually if needed.

Wireless world

Using Windows XP on a mobile device such as a laptop is not necessarily easier, but it is more practical. Microsoft has put a great deal of work into making Windows 2000 useable on a laptop - something that its predecessor NT 4 simply was not. With XP, Microsoft is building on the elements it introduced in 2000, such as enhanced PC card support, onboard driver database, support for hot-swappable devices and basic multi-connection capabilities.

The main area for focus is on wireless networking support. While the company has announced that XP will not include native support for the Bluetooth protocol for short-range personal area networking, it will have extensive support for most of the main wireless Ethernet standards, in particular 802.11.

Portable access to wireless networks can be achieved using laptop computers and wireless network interface cards. This allows the user to travel to different locations - meeting rooms, cafeterias, classrooms and so on - and still have access to their networked data and or generic internet access.

In addition to the expectation that businesses will embrace wireless networking as a means to quickly and easily expand the local area network, it is also expected that the same technology will be used to provide 'hop-on, hop-off' connectivity in public buildings and commercial premises such as coffee shops.

The use of a wireless card and connection means the user no longer has to carry additional cabling and adaptors to support a modem, ISDN or wired Ethernet card on the road.

Standard support

Windows XP is throwing the bulk of its support behind two standards; 802.11b for business and power users, supported by companies including Cisco, Lucent, 3Com and Xircom, and HomeRF, which is supported by Apple, Compaq and many smaller device manufacturers serving the lower end of the market.

These standards benefit from automatic configuration and media sense capability (the ability to detect a wireless network) under Windows XP, making it easier to wander from one network to the other without the need for user intervention.

This is all backed up with an expanded onboard driver database, with universal drivers and submissions from most brand name card manufacturers. This ensures that, in many cases, a user will be able to operate at least a basic wireless session without the need for a specific driver disk for their card.