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Issue
34 - December 2002
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Progress
of the Windows XP Upgrade
By
Joe Chow
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Since
September 2002, in addition to the normal support work, the
Computing Services Centre (CSC) has been busy carrying out
the campus-wide PC operating system upgrade to English Windows
XP with mutli-language pack. This again is a large-scale upgrade
exercise covering around 1,600 Staff LAN PCs. So far, we have
completed around 1,200 PCs and are behind schedule because
of the following problems:
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Frequent
changes of upgrade schedules by departments or individual
users with good reasons yet with short notice. It is therefore
very difficult to plan and meet the upgrade schedules. At
times we have unexpectedly more machines to upgrade than
the staff can handle while more often it's the other way
around.
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Some
feel so uncomfortable with the new Windows XP environment
that they decide to postpone the upgrade for as long as
possible.
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Some
departments change their mind on the memory upgrade and/or
installation of additional hard disks. For example, some
PCs do not have enough memory slots to upgrade to 512MB
unless all the existing memory is given up, the additional
increase in upgrade cost has forced departments to reconsider
or delay the upgrade.
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Cannot
backup and restore files that contain Chinese characters
under the old English Windows system. Additional effort
is required to work around the problem.
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For
some existing software or hardware, their compatibility
with the new Windows XP can only be confirmed by an actual
installation. Should users still insist on using incompatible
software or the hardware even though the upgrades have been
done, their PCs have to be reverted to the original Windows
version. As a result, both money and time are wasted.
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Some
computers were found to have contracted viruses prior to
the upgrade. The viruses contracted are of different types;
some can be easily cleaned by the anti-virus software while
the others cannot. For the latter, extra effort and individually
tailor-made remedial actions are often required.
Based
on the feedback from our users, the followings are the most
common complaints on the Windows XP upgrade:
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Perhaps
because of security or privacy concern, some users prefer
entering passwords themselves and therefore have to stay
around during the entire lengthy upgrade period, which could
last for a half-day or the entire day.
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Eudora
users have encountered problems in reading and writing emails
with Chinese characters.
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There
are difficulties in deciding the default Chinese language support
for the regional setting. Users can only select one among "HKSAR",
"Taiwan" or "US English", but the one selected
may only work for one application but not the others. This brings
them inconvenience because they cannot just simply change the
setting. They have to change it and then reboot their PCs to
make it effective.
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Users
who wish to upgrade to native Chinese Windows XP with full
Intranet capability will have to wait until the CSC has
completed the compatibility study on the existing hardware
and software with Chinese Windows XP as well as the necessary
re-writing of some of the program codes.
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Some
academic staff find their PCs become very slow after the
upgrade or after applying patches. Memory upgrade and/or
tuning of some system parameters normally can improve the
situation.
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For
security reasons, Windows XP change the way users share
their files with others. Some users find the file sharing
under Windows XP less convenient than the previous versions
of Windows.
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Several
operating system and application bugs were encountered and
subsequently eliminated by applying newly released patches.
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