Clayton wrote:
FWIW, a friend has an IBM ThinkPad, that came loaded with Windows 98. A couple of years ago, she upgraded to XP and found she could no longer play video DVDs. After some checking, we found that she has to buy the necessary software, from a web site that's very irritating and difficult to navigate through. She decided against providing her credit card info and went without DVD video playback. Another issue is when you install such things, you often get a load of crapware along with it. So, it is not always so easy for Windows users either.
interesting. This was new to me.
I've seen this many times before. A few friends bought XP off the shelf... no DVD playback at all. A few bought pre-assembled package deal machines from a local computer store... some included a crippled DVD playback application on a few.. others had complete DVD playback apps. The only option for most was to buy (or illegally download in some cases) some commercial software.
So.. this business of things like playing DVD out of the box... simply is a case of people getting systems with a software pack... not some inbuilt capability of Windows. Can't speak for Vista....
C.
Quite so. Windows built in hardware support is actually very poor. It's only because the computer manufactures install the systems, that the hardware is supported. In this respect, Linux is far better than Windows. I always get a chuckle when some new piece of hardware works fine with Linux, but Windows requires a driver install. -- Use OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org