A tale of 3.5 installations…

Hi folks. I present to you today a tale of woe, one of pain, of stupidity and of…three and a half installations. I have been running Linux since the Redhat 6.0 days (dual-booting before that). As close as I even get to Windows anymore is the occasional brush with idiocy at work. Consequently, I have not done a single Windows installation on virgin(-ish) hardware in years. However, thanks to the evils of the Friend of the Court in the state of Michigan combined with the problem of TurboTax only being available for Windows, this weekend I found myself trying to install Windows 2000 Pro and Windows XP Pro on a laptop I had that originally came with XP Media Center edition (the restore discs for which are long gone). And so the pain began.

The funny thing is that when I last installed Windows on hardware (virtual machines are a whole other ball of wax but we will get to that oddity in a moment) it was Windows that was the easy-install and Linux that was famed for painful setups; my how the times have changed. At any rate I had purchased a full (non-upgrade) version of both Windows 2000 Pro and Windows XP Pro for work over the years and thought to install one of them on a spare Toshiba laptop I had. It originally came with Windows XP Media Center edition so I thought worst comes to worst that would install properly. Christ on a stick was I ever wrong. First up was two attempts at installing Windows 2000 Pro which was usually the easier install; it was also the option that did not require product activation. The last thing I needed was Windows shutting itself off when I needed my tax info. Also, while I had not installed Win2K on hardware in a while, I had installed it on various virtual machines, usually thanks to VMWare Workstation. I *highly* recommend this product. This allowed me to run Windows in a cage so to speak for work.

In goes the disc, reboot and after 45 minutes, Windows proclaimed it was done. It reboots to… 640 x 480. And no network. No USB. Nothing. It barely functioned. After installing MANY versions of Linux on that and other laptops, and having all of the hardware recognized and configured for me out of the box, having Windows being so brain-dead about such common hardware was a cold slap in the face. Undaunted, I went to the Toshiba website, got the drivers for the network and video card (Intel gear all the way), installed it rebooted and still: it had not a clue in the world about the ethernet, the wireless, the graphics card nor the USB (there were many other bits of hardware it was equally confused about but I did not really care if the multimedia card reader worked; I just needed the fscking taxes done). Thinking I had done something wrong during the installation (I was also coding on two other projects at the time) I restarted the Windows 2K install from scratch and watched very carefully. At the end of another hour, still no hardware.

Deciding to suck it up and deal with the GD product activation I gave the reins of command over to Windows XP Pro. If there was an upside to this failure (not to foreshadow the outcome) it only took 35 minutes to not find a SINGLE BIT OF HARDWARE. Even with the right drivers installed from Toshiba. It was kind of funny though that it could not figure out either of the network cards yet was scolding me for not activating the product. However,the constant nagging (your product will cease to function in 30 days) finally got to me. I was pissed because for all of the laptops and desktops I had bought over the years that came with the Microsoft tax that I never used, now when I needed one version of Windows to work that I had paid full price for, it refused to function. So my wife got up this morning to the sound of me pacing the apartment cursing Microsoft, Bill Gates and his ways. I guess if I had not paid so much if any money for it or it was a pirated version I would not have cared.

Unfortunately, I still needed Windows and it needed to work today. So I swallowed my pride and went to Office Depot and bought the cheapest Windows machine I could find (which in my mind translated to the most expensive Windows license I could find). For 425 bones I picked up a nice little Toshiba laptop with a gig of RAM, dual core Intel processor, Intel graphics chipset and DVD burner. And Windows Vista Home. Woof. However, I figured that that would result in an out of the box experience of Windows actually working. Well, it did but instead of simply turning it on, having a simple registration screen or two and then me being in business, initial power-up resulted in it “examining” my hardware (I thought this stuff was supposed to come preconfigured!) for a good 30 minutes, rebooting, then configuring some more for another 15 minutes after which I finally got control of the box.

Two ironies arose from this: 1. Both Windows XP pro and Windows 2K Pro just dropped right onto virtual machines built on Linux but neither would install on the actual hardware. 2. In the time it took for Windows Vista Home to finalize or whatever the hell it was doing, I could have reburned the box with Ubuntu or even Debian network install. I have no clue what the hell Vista was doing.

Everyone talks about what a new experience Vista is and boy-howdy are they right. Just not in a way that I can appreciate. The “control” panel (you know that thing that *used* to let you configure your computer?) had two usable applets on it and the rest (20+ icons) were spam! Half were “offers” from Toshiba and the rest were offers and promotions from Microsoft and partners. Bleh. While I was waiting for it to find the wireless card, I clicked on the Play Games icon to see what games came with Windows these days. Again, 5 icons were actual installed games and the rest were “promotions” and crippleware or offers to purchase more stuff. I didn’t look at anything else; I didn’t have the stomach for it.

I came away from all of this with an even lower opinion of Microsoft. They can keep Vista. On the upside, I slide the latest version of Debian Etch onto the original Toshiba laptop. This was the .5 install; it took half the time and half the pain. And gave me ALL of the hardware. I honestly don’t see what the Windows fanboys see in that OS. After that experience, FOSS felt like a warm comfortable sweater. If Linux isn’t king on the desktop, it sure as hell has nothing to do with hardware or user-friendliness.

Jeff