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Unless it's one of the countless SATA, SCSI or RAID cards that XP doesn't support. Then you have to have a floppy disk with the drivers on to actually install it. Which is quite fun when the computer you are trying to install XP on doesn't actually have a floppy drive (what with it not being the 90's and all). So you then you have go to a different computer, download some software and build a custom windows XP iso before you can actually install. Doable, but hardly "out of the box"
You may still need to install the Motherboard Drivers first for USB, as Windows 7 RC1 didn't detect my Intel drivers. Thom is right about Ubuntu and printers.
I think the article implies that driver accountability lies with the Operating System and not people digging in driver forums so much.
UNIX and Linux were always great at detecting wired networking cards, but needed ndiswrapper for Windows wireless cards.
OpenBSD managed to rewrite wireless driver code for security flawed version 4.
I love OpenBSD's code auditing scheme, but Microsoft seems to extract bits of BSD for it subsystems and not know the base system. Why doesn't it extend its own network auditing system to programming and clean it up? KISS principle.
If you changed chipsets in the board swap, primarly the drive interface (from IDE to SATA, or from ICH7 to SB700) then whoops...you did it wrong. The OS cant load if it doesnt have drivers to...well, load itself. Its pretty easy to do a full board swap in Windows you just uninstall some drives. Turn the PC off. Swap out, boot up and done. Its how I've upgraded my parents pc with the same install of windows for five years.
Hi,
It turns out that Windows can't properly detect hardware changes - yet linux can.
For some versions of Windows (I'm not too sure if it's only OEM versions or what), you are only allowed to change 3 pieces of hardware before the OS decides it's running on a "different" computer (rather than the computer it should be running on), and then refuses to boot because of that. If you change the motherboard, then chances are you changed memory, CPU, hard disk controllers, USB controllers, ethernet, onboard sound, etc (they're all counted as separate devices), so you went past the "3 changes" limit.
If this is the case, then reinstall Windows from scratch and it'll probably detect everything.
-Brendan
I've had the opposite happen, I've changed the MB in a computer that dual booted Debian Etch and Windows XP, and Etch kernel panicked on the way up, XP trundled along, the screen flashed a few times, and it managed to allow me to login.
After login, it continued to grind, then it said it was finished installing new hardware, and wanted me to reboot. When it was done rebooting, XP ran fine. I had to reinstall Etch.






Member since:
2009-07-01
Well to start off:

1. Windows detects all hardware ... as far as I remember it as been like that since XP era, the drivers were there for the current hardware in the market. With linux it was the same ... it worked with current HW. Want an example? Huawei E220 no system had drivers for it, you plug and install driver...
2. Package management. Linux has in it repositories some software, but if you use specific things for Example Visual Paradigm, or MagicDraw or other application frameworks, we still need to go to their site and download the product .. just like windows. so .. windows is fine as it is.
3. Release management quicker? For god sake ... and it would be happening like happens with Linux 6 months release and braking backward compatibility. The Windows releases updates, security and functionality with SP. Without braking software (at least most of the times)
Just my though and experience