If you haven't heard about Windows XP, you soon will. Microsoft will release the latest version of its popular operating system next Thursday with a $200 million (€221 million) marketing campaign designed to persuade consumers and businesses to open their wallets.

The US software firm has enlisted pop icon Madonna to provide its XP theme tune and is hosting 62 separate launch events across the world to increase awareness of its new software, which Microsoft is dubbing the best version of Windows yet.

"It's bigger than Windows 95," says Mr Kevin Dillon, managing director of Microsoft's European operations centre in Dublin. "It has a variety of new features, it is reliable and very stable. It's a quantum leap forward."

From a technology viewpoint, Windows XP is an important strategic product release for Microsoft as it brings its customers a step closer to the company's dotnet vision of closer integration of computing devices and the internet.

Internet-enabled features incorporated in the operating system include Windows messenger, which allows users to see on their desktops when colleagues and contacts are logged onto the internet. The individual user can then communicate with the contacts in real time by using text, voice or video features.

Windows XP will also offer users better security features such as personal firewalls, controlled user-level access and an encrypting file system.

A new remote assistance application will enable users with a technical problem to get a friend or IT professional to log onto their own machine remotely to tackle a problem.

This type of remote access can also be used to give people access to their desktop computer when they are out of the office, although they must connect using a PC running Windows 95 or later editions.

XP users in Britain and the US can also access a technical support service provided by Microsoft via an interactive online chat facility, which will be available during normal office hours on weekdays. However, this feature will not be available to Irish users.

The new operating system will incorporate the anti-piracy feature Microsoft Product Activation, first seen in Office XP software released earlier this year. This uses the hardware configuration of your computer to generate a machine-specific ID code to eliminate illegal copying. However, observers believe it could cause problems for companies who will have to make frequent calls to Microsoft to verify their new software.

PC manufacturers are expected to take advantage of a slightly liberalised licensing policy from Microsoft that will enable them to put their own icons on the XP desktop and add options to the start menu. Microsoft relaxed its policy to allay some competition fears after speculation that XP's launch could be delayed by intervention from US federal authorities.

A successful launch is important for Microsoft, as it struggles to shake off its legal battle with the US Department of Justice and an ongoing inquiry by the European Commission. But this will prove difficult at a time when the PC market is experiencing shrinking sales for the first time in more than 15 years.

"Windows XP is not the answer to the declining market," says Mr Andy Brown, research manager at technology consultancy IDC. "We're not likely to see big sales volumes for XP as corporates never implement on the first sales package. It's being introduced at a very bad time with Windows 2000 just rolling out, and now XP adding to the confusion and causing a headache for IT managers," he says. "Many companies are still determined to implement Windows 2000."

Microsoft has been criticised for introducing new software too frequently and forcing customers to upgrade more than they would like to because of the firm's licensing programmes. After all, its last operating system, Windows 2000, was released just a year and a half ago, in February 2000.

Mr Joe Macri, managing director of Microsoft Ireland and the man responsible for selling XP in the Republic, says firms that have started to implement Windows 2000 should carry on with this deployment.

"Windows XP is based on the same code base as that of Windows 2000, which is very stable," he says. "The difference is that it takes this stable code base and adds all the new multimedia applications."

In contrast, home users will be attracted by the more stable code base provided by windows XP, Mr Macri says.

Existing Microsoft software aimed at home consumers, such as its Millennium product, already offers multimedia features but it is still based on the old DOS legacy code and, therefore, suffers from reliability issues - in other words, it crashes a lot.

Mr Macri believes Windows XP will boost the global - and the Republic's - PC markets.

"About one-third of Irish homes currently have a personal computer and we see a huge increase in this due to Windows XP."

He says about 350,000 PCs will this year be sold into Ireland, north and south, in both the business and consumer market.

Although XP software will not hit shop floors here until Thursday, some of you may have got a sneak preview of the product. Some retail outlets have shipped computers with XP pre-loaded, while Microsoft staff themselves have been working with the product for months.

All 1,700 staff at Microsoft's European product development centre and operations centre in Dublin have acted as "human guinea-pigs", running the software to test for bugs and other glitches. A core group of 150 staff have been working on the "localisation" of XP since July 2000.

This is the process of translating software into native languages and making it culturally acceptable in different nations.

Microsoft's European product development centre in Sandyford is helping to localise XP software into 24 languages - the product will be available in 33 languages in total.

"Our holy grail has been to get the critical languages ready as near the US launch date as possible," says Mr Aiman Copty, director of localisation at Microsoft's operations centre. "We have six languages released already to build the inventory."

French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Dutch and Swedish will be released along with the English version next week. Over the coming months, XP will be adapted for another 18 languages, including Bulgarian and Latvian.

"The localisation process is crucial to enable people to view the product in context," says Mr Copty.

"Most of this localisation is completed in-house, although we do outsource some specialised languages such as Slovene."