Yet another war story that people think are far and few between.
I've installed all of Windows OS's to date, except Win3.1, and the beta
XP. All of them have been a pain in the butt to do, and are far more
time consuming. Going through and hand picking the packages I wanted
in Mandrake still doesn't take as much time, and only one reboot!
Further more, every publication I've ever read says to stay away from
WindowsME! I've heard friends whine and complain about it, the guys on
TechTV tell people every chance they have to go back to Windows98 SE.
But I'm shocked that somebody told them to go and buy WindowsNT for a
laptop, and for a machine that was having drivers problems. NT has
always been a pain in the butt for anything special. They accepted
3Com cards, ATI video cards, and Soundblaster sound cards. That was
about it! Drivers has always been a HUGE gripe for NT users.
NT has always had problems with the install on laptops. At least in my
experiences, and I've tried quite a few times!
But as far as the install being easier in Windows then in Linux? I
don't know. Because I have no problems with any Linux install, and
trust me I've installed just about EVERY flavor of Linux at one time or
another. And in another month or so, I'll probably be running 3
different flavors of Linux here on my network. (Mandrake, FreeBSD, and
I'm thinking about giving Debian another try.)
So I think ease of install would have to be a direct issues with
hardware really. All my hardware is configured correctly, and all is
supported. That may have something to do with my ease of install.
tdh
T. Holmes
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UNIXTECHS.org
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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"Real Men Us Vi!"
| A friend of one of the folks here is finishing a Ph.D. in
| mathematics. He uses an IBM laptop and he was running mandrake
| 7.1. Recently, he installed 8.0. It didn't like his mouse, so
| he used an alternate image and installed kernel 2.2.19 and set
| up that one in the bootloader. His total time to install was
| 1.5 hours.
|
| Now to keep someone else happy, he had to install PowerPoint on
| the same laptop.
|
| He tried the Win98 restoration disk. It was missing so many
| drivers that he despaired of ever finding them all.
|
| He bought windows ME. The CD wasn't bootable. He restored 98
| and tried to use it to start the ME disk. The program told him
| that this was a CD for computers without windows and that he
| needed to buy the upgrade edition.
|
| He tried Windows NT. He had to seek professional advice (from
| the staff of a linux company because Microsoft wasn't helping)
| to get it installed. Then he discovered drivers simply were NOT
| available for some of the features he needed to run power point.
|
| He tried ME again, this time generating the famous 98 boot disk
| that is the closest thing to a swiss army knife Microsoft ever
| produced, Well, stage one--he couldn't format the partition.
|
| He booted into linux and fired up disk drake and took care of
| that ornery partition, even formatting it.
|
| WindowsME install program upchucked saying some nonsense about
| 64K clusters which it did not support.
|
| OK NOW the windows98 boot disk could format the partition. 4K
| clusters were verified.
|
| And ME still complained about 64K clusters and shut down.
|
| So, with 4 days and the purchases of two systems wasted, he is
| using Konqueror on the web to track down Microsoft Win98 drivers
| for his notebook. Then he will finally be able to load
| PowerPoint, we hope, unless it wants to see a different version
| of Windows, like XP.
|
| I am beginning to believe that if I took someone completely
| ignorant of computers, then he could install linux and have a
| fully functioning system a lot sooner than with windows.
|
|
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