Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (5130 mails)

[William Gallafent <william@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 23 May 2006 16:53, Greg Wallace wrote:
[snip]
> I have a Windows PC now that came from Dell with
> everything pre-installed.  Once I accidentally wiped out
> the drive and had to re-install the software.  After
> installing XP, I had to do separate installs of about half
> a dozen different drivers, including the network driver.
> This is not something that the 99% of PC consumers ever
> have to do.  If this happened to them, they would take it
> to someone and pay them to re-install it for them.

Well, that's Dell for you, perhaps. Was there not a recovery
disc with all the drivers etc. included?

I have reinstalled, from scratch (replaced HDD with new one
from other manufacturer), Fujitsu Siemens and Acer Athlon64
notebooks with Windows XP home (32 bit). In both cases,
using a standard Windows XP install disc (not the
manufacturer's disc) gets a running system, without graphics
acceleration but generally working OK. Then, you just put
the manufacturer's driver disc in, press one button in the
GUI that appears automatically a few seconds later, and all
the drivers get installed, plus the optional bundled
software (e.g. DVD player, CD/DVD burning software
etc.). There's an even easier way on the Acer, from the
"recovery partition", but when the disc's died that's not
much good ;). The FSs come with their own XP home install
disc, but that won't work if you've destroyed the disc.

To be honest, it has been far, far, far easier to get
Windows up and running on these two types of machine, with
all hardware supported/accelerated, than with SuSE. SuSE
10.0 was the best yet, but I still had to tweak several
things by hand to get them working (wireless (ndiswrapper),
IRDA (never got it working), nVIDIA graphics card with
1280x800 display, ...) which just worked out of the box, or
after one driver installation from the manufacturer's disc.

I still use SuSE (10.0 at the moment) on my machine as the
only OS, because that's what I prefer to _use_. VMWare
workstation provides Windows XP when
necessary. Installation-wise, though, Windows XP has
certainly been easier on these machines than SuSE 9.2 / 9.3
/ 10.0.

The machines I've built myself ... well, I've never
installed Windows on them, but I imagine I'd have to install
several drivers to get things working perfectly. Off the top
of my head, though, things like USB memory sticks and memory
card readers seem to work fine in XP without any drivers
installed, and I've had all sorts of problems (subfs,
anybody?) with them on various versions of SuSE. 10.0 seems
OK for those, at least.

Anyway, enough rambling. As you can tell, notebook HDDs have
some way to go in terms of reliability, in my experience ;)

-- 
Bill Gallafent.