here is a little more information that i found about the os
origional site
http://www.winmag.com/specialreport...01/msxp0214.htm
Windows XP Site
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/default.asp
February 14, 2001
After a ho-hum reception for Windows Me in the marketplace, Microsoft has now ripped the covers off something that has a lot more potential for excitement: Windows XP.
Windows XP is the next generation of and the successor to all current breeds of Windows -- Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, and 2000. It's based on the NT/2000 kernel, which is significantly more stable than Win95, 98, or Me, but consumes somewhat more memory. We looked at earlier versions of Windows XP, codenamed "Whistler," in our Microsoft First Windows 'Whistler' Beta, but many of the things that are showing up in XP were not present in that beta.
In a keynote speech at the public unveiling of XP, currently in its Beta 2 incarnation, Bill Gates noted that Windows is "the tool that literally hundreds of millions of people use every day to get their work done." To that end, the changes in XP -- which are intended to be both functional and cosmetic -- reflect how Windows is being re-worked, both at this stage and at stages to come, as a way to get things done.
The word most often used by Gates and other Microsoft representatives for getting things done is "task-oriented"; many extensions have been build directly into XP to support this new concept. The My Pictures folder in Windows Me and Windows 2000, for instance, sports some new hotlinks down its left side that allows anyone with a scanner or camera to quickly acquire images, process them, or upload them to an Internet image host or photo service. In the Start menu, the most commonly used applications now "bubble up" into the menu itself -- something like a program-oriented version of the way My Documents has traditionally worked.
Another major addition in XP that has never appeared in any version of Windows is on-the-fly user switching and a much higher degree of user segregation. This means that one machine can be more effectively used by multiple people, such as different family members or different people accessing a computer in a public environment like a library. You can sign the use of the machine over to a friend or co-worker without shutting down or rebooting, or even without having to close their programs -- sort of like a massive task-switching system, except instead of switching between windows, one is switching between user sessions.
Other features include a remote-administration system that lets you send a secure invitation to another XP user, allowing them to connect directly to your computer through a network and operate it as though they were sitting at your local console. (Although uninvited users can't crash your party there hasn't been any heavy-duty third-party testing of the security of the system yet.)
From the look of XP, Microsoft is trying to walk a fine line between making broad changes to Windows that are intended to make it easier to use -- and trying not to alienate longtime users of the operating system, who may balk at the way things have been significantly redesigned. Those running on machines with 32 to 64MB of RAM will also flinch when they find that the memory requirements have been upped -- tests with the beta show you need 64MB or more to get any real work done.
The one major change that won't alienate anyone is the dramatic increase in stability: The earlier beta showed it ran the vast majority of Windows 9x applications without problems and with noticeably better speed and multitasking smoothness than any existing version of Windows 9x.
The consumer and professional editions of Windows XP are slated to ship towards the end of the summer in 2001. Microsoft also has plans for server editions, which are designed to eclipse its existing server products. Relatively little information has been released about these products, or about the planned 64-bit versions of Windows designed to run on Intel's Itanium processor.