The installation was speedy and painless. I inserted the CD in its drive, followed the prompts, provided the requested information (such as screen resolution, credit card number etc.) and, just over an hour later, feasted my eyes on the lovely eye-candy that is the XP graphical user interface.

Being of a somewhat technical bent, and keen to look "under the bonnet" as it were, I immediately checked XP 's footprint and memory use. [When I say immediately, it took me just over twenty minutes to figure out how to get this information - but far from being a problem, this is a blessing: the ordinary user is protected from such complexities, and can get on with the job of creating rich multimedia content or whatever without having to be concerned with irrelevant details. More on this in a moment]. For the record, my new OS occupies some 1.6 GB of disk real estate, and at this moment is utilising an incredible 30% of my 384 MB of RAM.

Compare and contrast these figures with earlier attempts to create multimedia OSs, such as BeOS. BeOS was very poor value for money, even though it was free, weighing in at a mere 400 MB on disk and using less than 30 MB of RAM for most tasks. So what if it was a little faster. XP effectively gets four times as much out of your computer!

XP makes it easy to express oneself by providing a choice of animated Companions. These cute little critters - my favourite is the sweet little puppy - endlessly amuse and amaze. Dr Gates's Companions represent the apogee and maturity of the innovative leap that began with the humble Animated Paperclip. For power users such as myself, of course, it is relatively easy to switch off these features, but even then usability is not compromised. Let's click on Start-Search-For Files and Folders, as an example, and look for Microsoft Word XP . We are asked "When was it modified?" to which we answer "Don't remember". We are asked "What size is it Small, Medium, Large?" to which we reply "Medium". I pity the poor *nix or *nux user, with her "grep"s and "which word"s - not that those primitive OSs even have Office Suites - as I make my way through this intuitive, never patronising interface.

Now, just about any OS will let me type a simple document such as this one. I remember doing it (perhaps slightly faster, but without an animated Albert Einstein to assist me) with 512kB of RAM and a floppy disk. Where XP really is supposed to shine is as a multimedia OS. Let's grab some snaps from my little digital camera and see what this baby can do.

Remembering the endless tweeking of settings, the time-consuming editing, cropping, enhancing and titling that were demanded by my previous "rig", I'll just pop this USB plug into the appropriate hole in the camera, go and make myself a cuppa, and see if XP has autodetected the camera and loaded the appropriate driver by the time I get back.

Ah, that's better. Nescafe - nothing but the best. Nothing seems to be happening.

My good God!

XP has not only has detected the camera and loaded the driver, it has downloaded all my photos, automatically resized and titled them, uploaded them to Kodak for printing, e-mailed them to everyone in my Outlook address book, figured out somehow that there's a newer version of my camera available, downloaded and printed a colourful one-page brochure, and brought up an online order form, already filled in with my details, which will order a camera for me from my nearest retailer (which happens to be in Hoboken NJ, which is a little odd as I'm in Sydney NSW but never mind) in ten seconds time (unless I click Cancel-Are You Sure-Are You Really Really Sure-Yes) over the .NET using my Passport.

I am very, very impressed.

This is the level of functionality that we've been demanding. This is computing at the cutting edge - artificial intelligence that knows what I want better than I know it myself. Gone are those endless, wasted minutes spent experimenting, testing, thinking!

I have seen the future of the PC - and it is Dr William Gates's magnificent operating environment, Windows XP 2001.