On Wed, 24 Nov 1999, Ernest N. Wilcox Jr. wrote:
> stable manner. But you have to admitt that they have done a great job with the
> installer. Any user can install M$'s OS. Now if they'd just stop trying to
Actually I think I WON'T "admit" that. :) If you want to completely
reinstall Windows 95 (I assume it's similar for Win98), first you have to
make a DOS boot disk and put your DOS CD-ROM drivers on it (how many
newbies know how to do that? and how easy is it to do that if you don't
already have a working system?), then boot with that and run the install
from the CD. The actual installation program is simple, yeah--the only
options you're being given are which programs install, so it would have
required a lot of creativity to make it NOT user-friendly.
And then here's a common experience I had after installation: You boot
Windows for the first time, and it starts trying to install some other
stuff, from the CD, BEFORE IT BOTHERS LOADING YOUR CD-ROM DRIVERS, so it's
trying to install extra stuff from the CD before it bothers getting the
CD-ROM drive working, and thus it can't. There are two ways around this
(installing DOS CD-ROM drivers for the first boot, or copying the whole CD
to the HD and installing it from there) and I don't think either is
readily apparent to a newbie. A newbie will just sit there and wonder why
the hell it's not working like it's supposed to.
On the other hand, if you're installing Mandrake you just boot from the CD
and bam you're in a very simple, straight-forward, user-friendly
installation program that explains itself pretty well. RedHat's and
Mandrake's installation programs are very easy. The very first time I
ever touched Linux, I installed RedHat 5.2 without reading any
instructions or anything and the installation was a breeze. And I've read
plenty of reviews saying Caldera's installation is even easier.
-Tom
