SlashNOT

Mearzuh writes: The upcoming Windows XP Service Pack 2, to be released later this year, has been dubbed ‘Windows XP Reloaded’ by Microsoft.

“There’s a bunch of work being done on Windows XP,” said Greg Sullivan, lead Windows product manager, adding that Windows XP Reloaded was a marketing effort as well as a plan to enhance Windows XP software.

Windows XP: Reloaded is filled with a new software concept borrowed from the Java community referred to as ‘agents’. Agents will perform tasks on behalf of the system, such as power management, clearing memory of malfunctioning software, and attempting to destroy humankind. Further user interface improvements abound, such as new colorized buttons (Red for OK, Blue for Cancel). In an effort to compete with Linux in the clustered computing realm, XP also now supports a new feature called Matrix Computing Services which will automatically bind XP workstations together into a supercomputing cluster. Our preliminary tests show that most of the content in XP SP2: Reloaded, while visually stunning, is somewhat less coherent than the original and somewhat exhausting to use. Furthermore, numerous components are obviously not completed; Microsoft has announced that they will be finished in Windows XP SP3: Revolutions.

We recommend that users stick with the original and pretend that this release never happened.