Progress of the Windows XP Upgrade
by Joe Chow
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.