The message 20051105194614.GB18938@thebowery.co.uk from Adam Bower adam@thebowery.co.uk contains these words:
/snip/
Blimey! you've been *very* lucky then. It seems every time I end up having to "help" with a Windows machine it is because of driver wars, where the owner has tried and failed to get their hardware working. At the moment the Windows install on my laptop has killed itself *again*
Flaptops are ye work of ye devil.
(I only have Windows on the laptop for a few games for testing stuff with Internet Explorer and also in case the laptop breaks I don't want to freak out the "engineer" who would be sent out to fix it) and needs to be fixed but I keep putting it off as I don't want to spend the time on it.
I so seldom need a floptip that I still have a 500 MB HD on mine, and it runs DOS 6.11 and Win 3.11: I never play games, and I never use Internet Explorer - not even to verify web pages. If it works in Firefox and Opera and doesn't work in IE - tough.
(Another question I have is why are the Intel chipset drivers and the Wireless lan card drivers something like a 50 meg download *each* for Windows but only a few KB and already in the Ubuntu kernel? I think to get all the updates and drivers to install Windows XP on the laptop is currently running somewhere between 500 *MEGABYTES* & 1 *GIGABYTE*! of data and you don't get goodies like decent software with that.)
Pass. I haven't got wireless - nor even Mk1 LAN with wet string. However, practically anything written for Windows is bloatware, especially if supplied by M$ themselves. You ask why...
I have an hypothesis: when something new needs software, the developers in the Evil Umpire look round for something which does something similar, and then tack a bit on to it to make it work with the new gismo (not Gismo). And every flea has bigger fleas, and bigger fleas to bite 'em, and all those fleas have bigger fleas, and so ad infinitum - to paraphrase.
After the last time I had to install Windows on the laptop it took about 4 or 5 hours and lots of downloading of service packs and drivers (thank god I have ADSL!,
Well, I had the service packs - SP1 was included on the install CD, and SP4 was to hand, and I didn't time myself, but I reckon it took me some where between half an hour to three-quarters to install Win 2000 Pro, including formatting the HD - and 900 MHz isn't exactly fast these days. (Mind you, since I was using a 233MMX until recently, I notice the difference.)
True, I've had to apply several tweaks since, but that was due to my incompetence in building it, and nothing to do with Windows as such, (putting a master and a slave HD with the wrong sort of partitions (I suspect) on IDE1 and a CD/DVD-RW as master and a zip as slave on IDE2) and shuffling the components later sorted one problem, and then finding the UW SCSI card was faulty, and changing it cured the rest.
Mind you, I'd done it before.
even then the downloads themselves took another couple of hours on top if I had dialup then there would be no way I could have got the laptop working) compare and contrast to an Ubuntu install that takes, perhaps 20 minutes? and then some upgrades to packages which only take a few minutes of user interaction to deal with. I /think/ the only thing I need to do with Ubuntu and my laptop to make a bit of hardware work is that I have to copy the firmware for the Intel wireless card into the right place and this isn't really an Ubuntu "fault" as the problem is that Ubuntu can't redistribute the firmware because Intel says no.
Last night's abortive Debian install took well over six hours.
After all that I'm still left with a *very* unfriendly environment that needs lots of tweaks+powertoys+useful software (like firefox, gimp, anti-virus, putty etc. etc.) to make the machine useful with Windows compared to a shiny Ubuntu that came with most of the useful software I need on the CD (which is quicker to download and simpler to get running than that Windows junk).
Ah, well, I wish that OS installations wouldn't come with apps bundled in. For a start I would have left Mozilla out. If it were down to me I'd leave a lot of what comes bundled with Windows out too - IE, OE and Outlurk for a start. (Yes, I left Outlook and OE out during the installation on the previous box, but the cunning B******s seem to have arranged it so that if you do that, other things don't work properly, and whine because this file or that is missing.
And, I suppose French is simpler to understand if you're a Frenchman. While I've had Linux distros and loaded some successfully (FSVO successfully) I've never really understood it, but Zetnet is mainly a Windows-based environment, and the internal help groups lean in that direction too (with the exception of the Linux, Amiga, Atari, Acorn groups)
I'm wondering that as you are on dialup how you managed to keep up with the Windows updates and patches? Only the other day when installing a neighbours ADSL did he say "oh, I never bothered with those Windows updates before as they took too long with dialup". Even now I remember the horrors of downloading 100 meg service packs for Windows NT 4.0 on dialup and the Microsoft servers not supporting resume...
If I need big files (which isn't often), another Zetnut with widepipe downloads them for me. But there's very little support for Win 2000 now, and I'm never going to get XP.
</windows rant>
Thanks
My pleasure.