James first started this website when learning Visual Basic back in 1999 whilst studying his GCSEs. The site grew steadily over the years while being run as a hobby - to a regular monthly audience of over half a million unique developers. In July '08 James left his job as Head of Development at a digital agency in London to focus his energies on developerFusion full-time.
Additional features include fast-user switching, Remote Assistance and Remote Desktop. Fast user switching allows you to login to another account without logging out of the first one... the only proviso being you have enough memory to cope with this. Remote Assistance and Remote Desktop allow a PC to be remotely used via the internet or a network. This is especially useful for help-desk situations, where assisting users remotely would previously have been extremely difficult. The added bonus is that you no longer need to shell out for third-party software such as pcAnywhere for such functionality.
Recovery
Things always go wrong. If you go by that motto, then you won't be disappointed in the world of PC's. Although hardware reliability has increased dramatically, it still happens; either you do it yourself, or like me, your hard disk fails.... twice. Windows XP Professional includes a both a backup, and System Restore facility. The latter works by storing information in your free hard disk space about changes made to your operating system, marking system restore points. This means that if the world collapses after installing your latest software, you can go back to a stage before it was installed (or even right back to the point at which Windows XP was installed).
Boot-up and recovery options have also been improved from Windows 98. I succeeded in getting a blue-screen on startup after mix-and-matching driver versions (-- and I even got a warning from Windows telling me this will cause havok!). However, once restarted, Last Known Good Configuration got me back to a working windows in a second. Additionally, if you install new drivers, and they cause problems you can use the new Roll-back Driver option.
Networking & Internet
Internet Explorer 6 comes with a number of new additions. The first is a new privacy regime, built around to W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Platform for P3P (Privacy Preferences). This provides configurable settings for what cookies to accept and block. By default, it automatically blocks third-party cookies often used for tracking user habits. IE 6 also includes a Flash support as standard, along with the ability to resize large images to fit the screen, and a new Media pane for playing internet media within Internet Explorer.
The inclusion of a basic firewall with Windows XP is something that has been a long time coming, but much appreciated; it should at least give basic protection for the average user.
At the moment, no server edition of XP has been released... this is expected to arrive in early 2002, which will also include the new .NET framework.
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