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.