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Home : Articles : Is Windows Ready for the Desktop?

Microsoft's Windows has a large user base among people who use expensive, powerful computers essentially as games consoles, but is it ready for the desktop? It would be a good thing if there was another potential alternative to the obvious Apple or Ubuntu for inexperienced computer users.

In order to be ready for home and enterprise desktop use, it should meet the following requirements:


So, I'll take each of these in turn, explain a little more about why the requirement is included, and see if Windows delivers.

Convenient to try without installing

An operating system is often a major investment for a user, sometimes of money and often of valuable time. It's important that a user can try out an operating system, without committing to a purchase and without affecting the normal operation of the machine. This allows the user to check hardware support as well as determining whether they are comfortable with the way the system works; if the user finds that an important piece of hardware is not well supported, a Live CD means the whole installation can be easily deferred until a solution has been found, minimising disruption.

Unfortunately, I struggled to obtain a free copy. All of the downloads on the Windows Downloads page seem to assume that the user already has the operating system (including some links with misleading text like "Windows Installer" - not my first choice anyway as I was looking for a Live CD). Interestingly, a number of third parties supply copies of the operating system for free download in a convenient, ISO image form via a variety of distribution mechanisms including Bittorrent; see The Pirate Bay for example. However, Microsoft's site seems to make almost no reference to these services, and they don't seem to publish checksums of their official installation media for verification.

In fact, it seems that the license agreement Microsoft apply to this operating system is too restrictive to try the system without first purchasing a license to use it. This seems bizarre and would certainly put me off adopting their system; am I expected to part with my cash before having seen the system run well on my hardware?

I did find some references to the distribution, for free, of defective versions of Windows. These are only available at certain times, and are time-limited copies of the software that are known to be defective and unsuitable for general distribution. It seems the idea is that I should volunteer my time and my hardware to temporarily run a defective version of the operating system when the supplier wants me to, in order to report to them the ways in which it is defective. However, despite the fact that these are known to be defective, it seems they are not distributed as Live CDs, but only as installers (a bizarre omission).

That Microsoft expect me to decide by actually installing a defective version whether I wish to purchase a non-defective version at a later date, and even restricts access to the defective versions and actively disrupts their operation after a short time during which I am expected to effectively work voluntarily for them, seems truly bizarre. I have to conclude that it is certainly not easy to try Windows without committing to it.

End-to-end GUI installer

In a corporate environment, installation of the operating system can afford to be a little tricky. End users will not have to do it; installation will usually be handled by an IT Department or IT service provider, and a certain level of prior knowledge experience can be expected. However, for a home user, installation should be as slick, quick and easy as at all possible.

Unfortunately, due to the difficulties described above, I have not been able to test the installation process of Microsoft's current release; instead, I have based this section on the previous release (Windows XP), for which I have a license. Fortunately different releases of Microsoft's Windows operating system for the past decade or so generally differ only cosmetically, so it is likely this will also apply to their current release. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. If I do get the opportunity to try installation of the current release at any point I will update this article.

The installation starts by inserting the CD and booting from it. Immediately, I am presented with a cryptic menu followed by a text-mode installer; this is fine for a hobbyist's operating system but could be off-putting for inexperienced users. Loading drivers takes an inordinately long time. I am forced to agree again with the license agreement (despite the fact that in the process of opening the box and removing the disk from the packaging I have been told I have agreed with it already) and use a strange, inconsistent assortment of keystrokes to proceed.

Partitioning is a very clumsy process. Firstly, there is no resize option; to resize my existing Linux partitions I need to reboot from a Linux installation CD to make some free space. This does seem very inept of Microsoft, although in fairness most users who need to resize an existing partition will probably have a Linux CD handy anyway, so in practical terms it's not too bad, but does look a bit half-baked and unprofessional.

Eventually I am presented with a GUI installer, but this installer does not look like any GUI installer I've seen before. While it is running, I am unable to browse the web or run any other applications, which is a little irritating. I have very little chance to select packages or customise booting options, and at one point in the process I am expected to enter a ridiculously long and convoluted code of some kind. It takes me three attempts to get this code right, and upon doing so I am informed that something called Activation has failed. Worse, on rebooting I find that the installer has wrecked my boot configuration; there is no longer any option to boot Linux. Once again, I can only fix this by resorting to my Linux CD.


Having finally booted Windows, I have a basically functional desktop, but the single user account created during installation has administrative privileges - a dangerous slip-up from Microsoft (there was no mention of this when creating account, unless I'm much mistaken). I create a non-privileged account and change the video driver next. I receive periodic threats from the operating system about this Activation process so I attempt to complete it again, and again it fails. Eventually I phone the phone number supplied and, mysteriously, after entering another bizarrely long code and receiving another back, which must be entered into the computer, Activation succeeds. This makes no visible difference to anything, except that the periodic threats cease.

However, I do also receive another notification from the operating system informing me that "Antivirus software might not be installed" - the lack of certainty seems a little odd in itself, but I'm more alarmed by the operating system's confession that it is not capable of defending itself adequately from attack! But I'll return to security later.

Coexistence with other operating systems

Given that Windows is not a particularly flexible or capable operating system in many ways, it is likely that users will want to run a more modern system in conjunction with it on home machines. In a corporate environment, if Windows is chosen for desktop machines, it is likely that a single operating system will be installed (most corporate desktops are not expected to be fully functional computers anyway, so Windows may be adequate), but for home users it should gracefully manage coexistence with another operating system.

Unfortunately, as mentioned in the installation section above, Windows appears unable to cope with resizing partitions during installation or installing a flexible enough bootloader to handle other operating systems (I would suggest to Microsoft that they would be free to use GRUB if they are not capable of writing a working bootloader themselves).

Virtualisation, then, might be the answer. Windows XP does not appear to include any virtualisation tools, but then it is an older version; apparently, Virtual PC may have the answer. Unfortunately, it's not clear from its home page what guest operating systems it supports; the Comparison page seems only to compare it to a previous version, and it seems that an expected popular use of this technology is (very oddly) to emulate a past version of Windows on the current one! This speaks volumes about the current version I suspect.

A little web searching outside of Microsoft's hermetically sealed world revealed that Linux can be used as a guest operating system on Microsoft's Virtual PC but this can be problematic. It also seems strange to run a stable operating system on a virtual machine within a less stable one.

Support for a range of filesystems aids interoperability. Unfortunately, out of the box, it appears that Windows supports only outdated and primitive filesystems (one derived from a 1980s micro filesystem, and the other from IBM's venerable HPFS). There is no in-built support for popular filesystems such as ext2, ext3, ext4 or reiserfs, and although third-party software can be installed to extend this support, I am unimpressed with the small range of filesystems supported out of the box, and especially that the OS cannot boot from any modern filesystem.

Common applications included, but optional

Most computer users want to use email and the web, as well as doing word processing and playing and manipulating multimedia content. Many will also want to use spreadsheets and presentations, and a smaller group will require database and development tools. An operating system without development tools is a fairly poor excuse for an operating system; given that a computer is a general purpose programmable machine, an operating system which does not enable development is missing a very important feature, even if many users do not make significant use of it.

It makes sense to supply at least basic tools for all of these purposes with an operating system distribution. However, any or all of them should be optional; in a corporate environment it is often preferable to produce a small, light-weight and restricted platform, without development tools and media playing capabilities, and often without word processing, spreadsheets, presentation editing facilities, web browsers, email clients and so on where machines do not need those facilities. Many PCs used by business will be specialised, used essentially as appliances for a single purpose. In such contexts, any excess software constitutes a security risk.

Unfortunately, Windows, out of the box, meets neither requirement. No web browser is supplied (although a mock-up of a browser, which supports only an approximation of a subset of web standards, is supplied; perhaps this is intended as an example of what can be done if Firefox is installed), and the image editing application must surely be intended as a joke. Media playing is very limited.

No real word-processor, spreadsheet, database or presentation editing applications are included. These can be purchased separately, but the tools themselves appear to be of very low quality and the cost is fairly high. OpenOffice has been ported to this platform, and is clearly the best way to add these facilities to the machine; perhaps Microsoft could bundle it with future versions of Windows?

Development tools are also absent from the operating system distribution. A strange assortment of limited scripting technologies are included, but the bundled text editor is extremely primitive, lacking syntax highlighting and even basic features like automatic indentation. No popular languages are supported; a very esoteric shell scripting language, a BASIC derivative, and a strange implementation of ECMAScript can be run, but the latter two must be run through a very large and slow interpreter, with scripts heavily dependant on platform-specific features for which documentation does not seem to be included.

Given a few hours, the basic Windows installation can be made reasonably usable by downloading and installing a large number of free and open source tools, but this is cheating; essentially, Microsoft supply a kernel, a fairly limited shell and a few out-dated supporting utilities and the user can effectively pull the rest over from Linux in the shape of ports for the Windows platform in order to make the machine functional. This does beg the question: why not run all of these tools on Linux in the first place, instead?

Worse than the rather thin set of included features and applications, though, is the fact that many cannot be removed. Internet Explorer (as the browser-like program is called) cannot be uninstalled, which for a monumentally useless application is a bit of a pain. Given that it is not actually capable of browsing the web, it would be useful if it could be removed to save disk space; all sensible users will install a real web browser anyway, so this is just unnecessary duplication.

Media playing facilities (which, similarly, seem to be a partially functional mockup) cannot be removed. There are also some truly inexplicable features: the 'search for files' feature includes a three-dimensional, animated dog which can be hidden, but not actually uninstalled! I can see that this could be an appealing feature in an operating system for young children, but in a corporate environment it is an absolute must that such playful but wasteful features are removable, so that computing resources which after all must be paid for and maintained are not squandered.

Good security and stability, out of the box

Corporate users may incur significant costs when their systems are unavailable or not fully functional, and may handle sensitive data like customer contact details or payment information. Home users may reasonably expect to use their computers without dedicated IT support and without expending much time and effort maintaining the machine, and may often have little technical expertise available at short notice. Therefore, good security and stability out of the box is extremely important to both user groups.

Windows is so notoriously insecure that, as mentioned earlier, the operating system itself warns after installation that without additional third-party tools to detect successful automated attacks (mostly after they happen), it is not capable of adequately defending itself against attack. System logs are minimal and management and monitoring tools are sorely lacking.

Software used to detect failures of security is a major drain on computing resources in itself, which degrades the user experience and effectively devotes a significant proportion of companies' and end users' own equipment to working around the innate insecurity of the underlying platform. However, once it has been installed, with some careful configuration, the system can attain moderate levels of security, suitable for dealing with non-sensitive data and performing non-critical functions.

Windows' lack of stability is also legendary, although this has improved a little with recent releases. Kernel panics were so frequent before Windows XP that the fatal error screen they provoke is widely recognised and even has a nickname, known to many normal users as well as all administrators (the 'Blue Screen of Death'). Stability on recent versions is poor enough that people who work exclusively with Windows are still accustomed to seeing indecipherable error messages and dealing with 'random' glitches without any real expectation of determining the underlying cause.

It is still considered normal practice to reboot Windows after updates to libraries and other peripheral pieces of software; a full system restart on more modern operating systems is generally required only to replace the kernel (and even then, it is not always required).

Hardware requirements should be modest

An average PC probably has an operational lifespan of at least two decades. Given the pace of technological development, however, it seems fairer to consider a reasonable minimum specification to be something less than one decade old; say:

While this is at the low end of the spectrum, with other operating systems it would be possible to use such a machine to handle email, web, word processing, spreadsheet, database and other typical desktop PC uses. Audio playing should be possible, although it would not be surprising if a little more power was required to play full screen video.

The current version of Windows will not run on this hardware (see the hardware requirements published by Microsoft; however, these stated requirements are widely regarded to be wildly optimistic - see also Daniweb's article clarifying requirements, which doubles the memory requirement for example).

Conclusion

Windows is an interesting system, but is just not ready yet for corporate or home desktop use. It may be worth watching as time goes on; rumour has it that Microsoft have transformed Internet Explorer into a very slow, incomplete web browser for version 8 for example. I would say that in the meantime, VMS enthusiasts might be curious about this less capable derivative, and it could be quite entertaining for computer enthusiasts to install it and try to keep it running, but serious computer users still need to have a modern operating system installed to get any work done.

With a lot more work from Microsoft, Windows could be ready for serious use in areas where security is unimportant and stability is not a major concern as soon as 2015.