I found that installing a fresh copy to another partition went very smoothly. Upgrading from an older version on the other hand, did give me some problems. I had a few driver issues arise during the upgrade which drove the setup program batty. Another time it completely froze during some kind of detection phase. The PC went into an endless loop, rebooting whenever it reached that same phase in the setup procedure. Pretty strange. I have no way of knowing how typical these problems are, but I would say that Microsoft needs to work on some bug fixes to the setup procedure. Of course this can be done dynamically by Microsoft because the setup utility has a feature allowing you to download the latest setup files before continuing. Dynamic Update, as it is called, will download the new files and use those to install XP. Installing a new copy (without upgrading) was as smooth as can be, and I beat myself over the head for not trying to do it that way earlier - especially given that I can very easily just multi-boot into any operating system I want.

As far as the install process is concerned, it is a pretty typical operating system installation that isn’t really worth addressing. The setup interface is updated to look nice. Like previous versions of Windows, Microsoft has made every effort to make the setup procedure as hands-free as possible, with the PC restarting itself when needed, etc.

The install CD has a System Compatibility check that can be run with the click of a button. The Upgrade Advisor will scan your system and alert you to potential incompatible drivers. As for requirements, you need to make sure you have at least 1 gig of spare drive space on the installation drive, along with at least a 300MHz processor and 128 MB of RAM. This would be bare minimum, though, and I would recommend higher.

The last portion of the install that is worth addressing is the Product Activation procedure, something that has drawn a lot of fire from the privacy freaks. Designed to crack down on software piracy (something quite frankly they could never do), it ensures that you cannot make copies of your operating system and install it on other PCs. The way they do this is that they require you to activate the software online or by phone within 30 days or the OS shuts down. Activation is based on the product ID and a hardware hash value, which is dependent on your specific hardware. This effectively ties the OS to that computer. If you make 5 or more major changes to that hardware configuration, it will force you to reactivate the product. A reactivation will reset the clock on the hardware changes. Likewise, the clock will reset every 120 days. If you replace or reformat your hard drive and wish to re-install XP, you will need to re-activate it.

This is something that is new to the operating system realm, but not completely new to Microsoft. Office XP follows the same procedure. Not every version of XP contains the code for this. Consumer copies or any version bought in a store will pretty much require you to follow this procedure. It is only the versions that are bought via a volume licensing arrangement from Microsoft that do not require users to do this.

This procedure has drawn a lot of fire because it supposedly is an invasion of privacy. I do not view it as such, although I do view it as an inconvenience. The procedure does not require or use any personal information at all. Also, the registration only used a hash value generated locally by an algorithm that is supposedly uncrackable. It does not scan your system and tell Microsoft all about it. It simply sends over the hash value. With the clock-resetting on hardware changes every 120 days, this should not be an issue for most users. Those of us who have installed an OS on more than one machine, though (and face it - a lot of us have), will find this to be a pain. But, that is Microsoft’s mission.