I am currently dual booting Windows XP and Fedora Core 1. I recently upgraded my PC, actually, I more or less bought a new PC. New processor, new motherboard, new graphics card, new memory and so on. Basically, only my soundcard, hard drive and DVD-Rom made the cut into the new PC.My old PC had a VIA motherboard with an Accton Cheetah LAN card, and SDRAM and a Duron processor ran on top of everything.
The new PC has an NForce motherboard, with built in network and has DDR333 RAM. An Athlon XP proccessor proudly does duty here.
So, here I am, just bought a new machine, and I needed to get to using it. How where my experiences. Well, the were as follows.
I put the old hard drive into the new tower as a primary master, and added my new drive as slave, then I connected my 2 optical drives, CD writer and DVD-ROM together. I realise this arrangement may be less than optimal, and some school of thought says you should preferably connect eac hard drive as master, with the optical devices as slaves. Well, lets just say, the guys who made my ATX case, and the guys (or girls) who designed the IDE spec did not make this easy.
Anyway, after booting on the new PC, I came to the familiar grub, and I decided to try boot into Windows. I promptly got a blue screen. Yes, there is a blue screen (Why couldn’t Microsoft make it red to avoid the association) This screen basically means your PC is halted. An attempt to boot into safemode brought me right back to the blue screen. Ther was no progress here at all.
Darn it, I need to use this PC. What do I do? Boot into Linux? Would Linux pull it through where windows has failed? What are my chances? These were all questions making rounds in my poor head. Well, it doesn’t hurt trying, so I booted again, and chose Fedora as the boot destination this time around. Shockingly everything worked as it was supposed.
Kudzu promptly found all my new hardware, and promptly asked me what to do with missing hardware. A few seconds later, I was staring at a login prompt. But my Silver lining had a cloud as it were. The resolution was all wrong. The lettes and numbers were all too big. Thank God for redhat-config-xfree86. A minute later, I was staring at a flawless operating Fedora Core 1. The only problem I had was that the non-accelerated drivers for my graphics card were now default. That changed pretty quickly, and I am now back to my old OS, sans the slowness of course.
So what did I have to do with the Windows to make it work? I had to run recovery on it from the CD, and later had to redownload all the updates, including service pack 1 (since all the files had been overwritten).
I am not going to score anything, but Linux impressed me much. No problems whatsoever. Windows needed some ingenuity to get it working again. 2 years ago I would have simply reinstalled but I am more time-conscious now.
Does anyone else have any upgrade stories?
I would like to know if anyone’s experience mirrors my own.
since i’ve compiled things for my specific hardware completely switching a box like this would probably require days of recompilation.
the price to pay for optimization
didn’t he have to buy a new Windows XP license when he upgraded most of his computer parts?
No, it is not always necessary.
Isn’t going to bug him because he repaired his install, in contrast to a reinstallation.
You shouldn’t need to buy a new licence. XP is registered to the hardware; if you upgrade and it complains, then all you have to do is call MSFT and have them transfer the license to the new computer. MSFT likes it this way because XP calls home and checks to see if the current hardware is the licensed hardware, if it’s not then it’ll disable itself (you can call MSFT and bye a license to make it work).
I have this thing about customizing my kernel to the bare minimum to match my hardware. So adding/changing hardware always requires a recompile. Usually only a 10 minute process if it’s just a single device. But it can be kind of time consuming with an entire new setup.
As far as Windows goes, I’ve never really had any problems adding/changing 1 device. But I don’t even try to save the system if I’m doing a major hardware change. I figure that’s as good of a time as any to have a clean re-install.
You are going to have to reinstall windows if you replace your mobo, memory, etc. These components are what generate the key for your computer under windows xp. So if the keys dont match it is going error.
Why i prefer a modular kernel, that way i can include most of whatever i want the kernel to support in future anticipation or some unforseen emergency, keeps overall kernel size smaller and the only modules loaded are what is used.
Monolithic kernels are a pain in the a**. This is something most of the larger distro’s do well with their own regularly updated kernels.
Yet another article made by a Linux zealot to make Windows look retarded and Linux look good.
Yeah, if only they didn’t make it so damn easy!
I don’t think so. His Windows installation probably fudged up because it wasn’t able to find a suitable IDE driver or tried to load his old driver. To my knowledge, Windows doesn’t automagically redetect all your hardware every time you boot up your machine… and honestly, I think it’s a bad idea to upgrade your machine without reinstalling your OS. I never trusted automagical detection.
That’s pretty much on par with my experience. I’ve got a primary desktop that’s been massively updated 3 or 4 times over the years. Initially it was a Windows only desktop. At BEST when I did the hardware upgrade, I had to reboot several times and go through add/remove hardware. At worst I had to reinstall the software from scratch.
At some point I installed Mandrake as a dual boot option and wound up using it more and more, finally another hardware upgrade came along and I’ve got to say, I essentially took the hard drive out of the old case, put it in the new box and booted. EVERYTHING worked. 15 minute massive upgrade…. very nice. My windows partition is still there, but I’ve never had the time or need to go through a reinstall.
I guess I might be labelled another linux “zealot” by one of the previous posters…, but if it works better than the alternative for your needs, why shouldn’t I be proud to use linux?? My years using windows were full of frustration, these days using the computer is much more fun.
and specifically to this comment ….
“Yet another article made by a Linux zealot to make Windows look retarded and Linux look good.”
If the experience were fabricated, I’d go along with you, but if the facts make windows look inferior to linux in some ways, what does that tell you?
“4 is less than 6”
“another “6” zealot trying to make “4” look inferior….”
Ive had to do something similar on several occassions. Never a full motherboard upgrade though — but definately swapping hardware in and out.
The great thing about some Linux distros is you really can install Linux on the hard drive, then just put it in any other computer and boot it up, and the hardware detection just captures everything. Of course now I’m using Gentoo, so its not quite as easy .. but still, Mandrake/Fedora are great for stuff like that.
I really can’t say I miss Windows when I hear stories like this. Admittedly, XP is still (imo) the best Windows OS out there, and I always had the least problems with it, but booting up and having that nasty BSOD generally means a complete reinstall. Bummer. :T At least you can mount the drive in Linux, copy all your stuff over, and bam you’re done.
Still, as hard as it is to install and optimize Linux, it’s so much less a hassle when it comes to swapping out hardware, changing settings, etc.
What I think you experienced is what I like to call the “ACPI of death”. Just check out the number of people suffering from the “ACPI of death” thus requiring the re-installation of Windows. Btw, this isn’t a ACPI issue but the way Windows interacts with ACPI. Whilst the rest of the known universe are QUITE happy to use Intels ACPI BSD licensed code, off goes Microsoft to re-invent the wheel again.
With that being said, I’ve always re-installed my operating system when building a new computer. I’ve found that Windows XP is a bit of a shocker when it comes to bugginess; example of this, reinstall Windows, delete the partition, press enter on the “empty space” selection and you’ll find that rather than the drive being assigned as “C:”, it will be assigned as “F:”, this is a *VERY* basic bug that should have been fixed within the first couple of weeks, and yet, it made it onto the final version.
The problem with Microsoft is that they can’t take criticism seriously. People have bashed (along with me) Sun’s crappy Solaris x86 effort, now they’ve picked up the pace and things are developing; expect in Solaris 10 support for USB2, AGP3.0 and Serial ATA.
The fact is, it isn’t whether there is errors but how they’re handled. If they’re not addressed then the customer will get disgruntled, however, if a problem is found and corrected immediately or within a “timely” manor, then most people I know are willing to cut the organisation some slack.
Heck, when Windows XP Professional was released, I expected bugs but not obvious ones like the installation. Same goes for MacOS, I expected bugs, however, so far, my experience has been pretty good.
I’ve had to do this four times in the last year — once on my server to upgrade the HDD, once on my dad’s computer, and twice for my friends. With Linux, I just copied all the stuff on the old drive to the new drive, and it Just Worked (TM) On Windows, I futzed around with it for hours before I gave up trying to save the old installation. I ended up loading a Knoppix CD, backing up the data to my computer over the network, and telling my friends to reinstall Windows.
Windows’ hardware detection is usually very good, but its *very* fragile. Moving the whole install to a new hard drive is very complicated, and almost guarantees that the new drive will not be bootable. The Windows XP “Recovery CD” is absolutely useless in trying to fix this — it takes forever to bootup, it doesn’t have network access, and it has no tools (ftp, ssh, etc) to speak of. Further, the fact that its so opaque to the user makes it very hard to debug anything. My roommate has a Playstation->PC controller converter that just refuses to work reliably on his computer (his friends have no problem with the same hardware). We spent hours (on more than one occasion) poring over the inf files that come with the driver, trying to figure out what black-voodoo magic it does to the registry, but eventually just gave up.
“Whilst the rest of the known universe are QUITE happy to use Intels ACPI BSD licensed code, off goes Microsoft to re-invent the wheel again.”
Oh, its worse than that. Hardware vendors have actually started putting bugs in their ACPI firmware to work around bugs in Microsoft’s ACPI implementation. My Dell laptop, for example, has ACPI problems in Linux because its DSDT (a critical ACPI table on the motherboard) is broken? Why is it broken? So it’ll work with XP’s brokenness…
“since i’ve compiled things for my specific hardware completely switching a box like this would probably require days of recompilation.
the price to pay for optimization
”
That all depends on how you define optimization. GCC not having much code for P4 or Athlon or even i686, you are probably wasting your time.
I don’t know, this just seams like a user trying to do something you really shouldn’t. Anytime you replace your mobo you should just re-install windows (or any OS for that matter). It’s not that big of a deal to do it all over. If you try to swap the hardware out from under windows it’s probably not going to run as nice as it could. I don’t think this is any fault of windows. There isn’t any good reason why you should be able to replace the computer and not have to re-install. A minor component is no big deal.
I would think if windows had some way to work around this it would probably means some slow hardware detection every time you boot. No thanks, I’ll pass on that.
It’s not that big of a deal to do it all over.
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It takes hours to reinstall Windows! Then you have to get all yoru settings correct, reinstall your apps, etc. Blargh!
If you try to swap the hardware out from under windows it’s probably not going to run as nice as it could.
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Why shouldn’t it?
I don’t think this is any fault of windows.
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Of course it is. Windows shouldn’t assume that the hardware it ran on the last time was the same as the one it’ll run on next time. It should detect the actual physical state of the machine each time, using existing knowledge as a “cache” to speed up the process.
There isn’t any good reason why you should be able to replace the computer and not have to re-install.
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There isn’t any good reason why you *shouldn’t* be able to do that.
I’ve done this sort of thing successfully with Win9x several times with only minor problems. NT, 2K, and XP always required a reinstall.
I also moved a HD from a Beige G3 to a B&W. The B&W took two or three minutes to boot, but it ran Jaguar perfectly with the exception of setting the screen resolution from 1280×1024 to 1024×768. the B&W runs Panther now, and the only kernal panics I’ve seen were from trying to overclock the CPU.
This HD’s had OS 8.5, 9.x, X.1, X.2, X.3 on two very different machines without being reinitialized. I always thought that was pretty cool.
“You shouldn’t need to buy a new licence. XP is registered to the hardware; if you upgrade and it complains, then all you have to do is call MSFT and have them transfer the license to the new computer. MSFT likes it this way because XP calls home and checks to see if the current hardware is the licensed hardware, if it’s not then it’ll disable itself (you can call MSFT and bye a license to make it work). ”
Yes, but what happens when XP is at end of life, will you still be able to transfer it? What if MS does an Enron and goes out of business? This activation stuff is really not acceptable unless you get the sofware for free and your data have no value.
Some BIOS makers actually specifically look for Microsoft OS strings in the ACPI DSDT tables compeletely breaking ACPI of that computer for any OS (except for Windows of course). I’ve seen this in A LOT of laptops. FreeBSD made a work around for this by allowing the OS identification string to be overridden. An ulgy hack for a stupid problem.
It takes hours to reinstall Windows! Then you have to get all yoru settings correct, reinstall your apps, etc. Blargh!
Hmm, yes. It takes a long time to install windows. But I can assure you, I’ve wasted more hours trying to get Linux to do things that windows does automatically than I have installing windows over.
Besides, I recently swapped my motherboard, no problems. Hell, I remember swapping from AMD to INTEL before that and had no problems either. Cheer linux all you want. I avoid it like the plague myself. Plenty of other good free OS’s out there without the religous ferver of Linux.
I really can’t stand these “why I think linux is the uber god operating system” articles. They are opinion peices I could do without. Let’s get some more articles on *technology* maybe. That would be nice. Of course, people probably wouldn’t read them because they contain real information.
I have seen exactly what the author described many times. Linux tends to be far more able to survive the transition from one motherboard to another and even handles other hardware changes better. Linux may not support all the latest whizbang hardware that WIndows supports but what it does support tends to work better.
Before changing the motherboard change the hard drive controller to be a standard dual pci controller and windows will boot fine on the new board. Because WinXP is a fully protected OS, it doesn’t boot to a basic setting and then load/find appropriate drivers, it loads the proper driver from the start.
im a pretty big linux fan, but this is more of a difference in functionality than a point for linux. windows has drivers for the hardware in your machine. it has really crappy defaults for other stuff (vga mode for example) but it doesn’t plan for you to throw in a new mobo. it seems more like it does now because they put so many drivers with XP, and because the cab files are on teh drive now, but under 9x you pretty much had to have a driver disk for EVERYTHING and everytime you added something, you needed your win cd (unless you copied the cab’s on the hdd)
linux carrys everything with it. not because it expects you to change hardware either, but the linux kernel is designed to use modules. it comes in handy when you want to add something but don’t really feel like rebooting. this is also one of the reasons i switched from dual boot to only linux on my big box a while back. i didn’t feel like creating a driver floppy for my sata drive. this brings up another nice thing with linux, the fact that it stays more cutting edge. there are new releases every 6-12 months, where as 3-5 years for MS.
i guess maybe it is an advantage, but ive never really looked at it that way, ive just seen it as more of a “the way you are supposed to use it thing.”
basically you aren’t supposed to change comps like that without reinstalling.
Hmm, yes. It takes a long time to install windows. But I can assure you, I’ve wasted more hours trying to get Linux to do things that windows does automatically than I have installing windows over.
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Well I haven’t, not in the last couple of years, anyway. My Linux machines just work. The three Windows machines need some tender-loving care. So what does that prove? How does that statement make any sort of relevent point about the article at hand?
Besides, I recently swapped my motherboard, no problems. Hell, I remember swapping from AMD to INTEL before that and had no problems either.
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Try doing something like changing your hard drive. That’ll mess things up. And changing AMD to Intel easily is to be expected — CPUs don’t need drivers, so the OS doesn’t have to do anything with them.
Cheer linux all you want. I avoid it like the plague myself. Plenty of other good free OS’s out there without the religous ferver of Linux.
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What religious frevor? Can you point to religious frevor in my post? Besides, that’s what we call an ad hominem fallacy. I may be exhibiting religious frevor, but that doesn’t mean my argument is wrong. FYPE (For Your Personal Enrichment):
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
I really can’t stand these “why I think linux is the uber god operating system” articles.
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And I can’t stand the “Microsoft just made this new innovation that nobody has ever done before — Longhorn/C#/.NET/Xen/WinFS/Avalon is teh r0x0rz!” articles. Again, what does that have to do with the argument at hand? Nowhere did the author say “Linux is the uber god operating system!” He showed an example of a situation where Linux is more easily maintained than Windows. My post pointed out that in situations like these, Linux usually is more maintainable. How do your “points” refute our propositions?
Many people seem to be pointing out that you are not supposed to change computers without reinstalling. Why is this so? When you have a computer with settings customized, and all, it is really a hassle to have to install everything all over again. It took me weeks, if not months to get my computer into the state it was then, and I really wanted to avoid having to wipe out a whole install just to upgrade. A lot of care went into my settings, and I do not want to have to go through that whole process again.
… have their Windows Updates burned to CD. There are even custom post SP1 packages including all fixes for XP, similarly, post SP4 fixes for W2K. They will conveniently install all the stuff in one row. There are a few reknown sites out there with proven packages. If you do installs more frequently it’s insane to d/l all that crap over and over again for every machine. At least you should slip-stream the current service pack into your Win-install-CD.
When I ran Windows 9x, I kept it stable by keeping an image of a fully-installed system on the CD-R. Once a month, I’d wipe the disc and copy the image back to the hard drive. Took 15 minutes, tops. Worked pretty well, actually.
Of course, in this day and age, you’d have to replace CD with DVD-R
<snip>
It takes hours to reinstall Windows! Then you have to get all yoru settings correct, reinstall your apps, etc. Blargh!</snip>
No kidding … One of my favorite things about linux is my home directory. If I back that up, it doesnt matter what distro I use. All my wm, browser, xmms, etc. settings are in there. I lose absolutely *no downtime* to reconfiguring my settings. You just can’t beat that.
If you uninstall every single specialized driver in the current system before swapping out major portions of your PC, then windows detects these devices and installs the appropriate drivers upon next reboot.
eg: you’re changing your display card from an Ati radeon to an nvidia, then the drivers for the former must be completely uninstalled before trying to physically install the latter. If more than one device is being swapped, then obviously the drivers for all the devices that are being changed must be uninstalled.
This works since upon next reboot, windows tries to load generic drivers using generic settings (eg: DMA disabled) that work with most devices. Once (if?) the GUI part loads successfully, then the New Hardware found wizard takes care of the rest.
Ultimately, I suppose its all a tradeoff: Linux sacrifices bootup time for handling major hardware changes, whereas Windows sacrifices portability in preloading the drivers for the current hardware profile. But then again, how many times a year do regular joes swap out major parts of their PC?
I did this exact same thing with LindowOS. I don’t use Windows so I didn’t have to mess with that part. The hardware upgrade with LindowsOS was flawless and since debian doesn’t use kudzu I didn’t even have to answer any questions. Note, this kind of thing especially works best if you don’t have hardware that requires proprietary drivers.
I did do my homework when I bought new hardware though. I made sure to buy a Soyo motherboard with a Via chipset because I knew it’d play nice with linux. I passed up the Nforce boards for this reason. I’ll do the same when I choose a video card (I’m using the onboard right now).
Many people seem to be pointing out that you are not supposed to change computers without reinstalling. Why is this so? When you have a computer with settings customized, and all, it is really a hassle to have to install everything all over again. It took me weeks, if not months to get my computer into the state it was then, and I really wanted to avoid having to wipe out a whole install just to upgrade. A lot of care went into my settings, and I do not want to have to go through that whole process again.
I agree with what you’re saying. The fact is, when Windows rebooted, it should have said, “bloody heck, I haven’t seen that motherboard before! it doesn’t appear in my settings file, maybe the user has changed the hardware; I better do the prudent thing and re-detect his hardware fully, and display a notice indicating that the hardware has changed and thus the extra booting time is being used to re-detect the new hardware”. That is what SHOULD be taking place.
I’ve had to apply a ghost image made from an optiplex gx400 to a gx1.
very different motherboards. the first attempt died.
but i figured out the trick, to make just about any optiplex image work on any other optiplex.
go to device manager, change the IDE controller from Intel XXXXX (specific device) to generic IDE controller (by updating driver)
then remove lan device, remove video, remove audio, etc.
upon reboot the system will run with the generic ide driver, and auto detect all the devices you remove from device manager.
of course before i boot up again, i had powered off system and ghosted the drive.
applying that image to really different hardware always worked.
the only show stopper would be something like an exotic IDE controller that normally requires F6 at install time.
your SOL then.
It’s very simple to change your system and keep your “old” windows.
Just follow these basic steps (always worked for me):
Before upgrading the system got to the device manager and change the Computer Type Driver to “Standard PC”.
Now upgrade your system, start in windows and let windows automatically pick the right driver for your new system.
this all makes me wonder about what actually is happening at boot time.. both on Linux and on XP. with Linux it’s alittle informative than Windows i think (with all those boot messages). But the question is.. what is it that makes it so different between the two OSes (kernel design maybe? architecture? coz of the modular kernel?), and when it comes to big new hardware change(i.e. motherboard) why are they behaving so differently from each other? any thoughts?
How can you say Windows is ready for the desktop when you have to go and do all that! I mean, how is the average user supposed to know what a Device Manager is? What is a “lan device” and what does “ghosting the drive” mean?
Yeah, I know, this is a stupid comment. But honestly, that’s how some Windows users on this board sound when talking about Linux. They have all this previous experience, and then are miffed because it doesn’t apply to Linux any more. Some of y’all act like you’ve never had to debug an IRQ conflict (or something of that nature) in Windows. Honestly, the only people who can really claim that their platform “Just Works” with regards to hardware are the Mac folks…
Windows NT actually has a sophisticated device management subsystem. There is a central “Plug and Play” manager where device info is maintained. Hardware scans, as well as device plug/unplug interrupts send messages to the PnP manager specifying what devices have been removed/added. As the PnP manager handles these messages, it loads the appropriate device drivers.
Linux 2.6 is similar. In-kernel handlers do a bus-scan at bootup to detect PCI cards. Also, the kernel handles device plug/unplug interrupts to see when new devices are added/removed from busses like PCI, USB, etc. Instead of handling the device drivers in the kernel, however, it, merely reports these events through an interface called sysfs. Then a userspace program (like hotplug) handles loading the appropriate drivers.
I think the problem with XP isn’t the underlying device management model, which is very good, but the fact that it maintaines a lot of state in the registry. On Linux, nearly all the device info is redetected each time the system starts. On Windows, device plug/unplugs create all sorts of permanent registry entries. Also, Windows makes a lot of assumptions at install-time. For example, it seems to make a lot of assumptions about the drive it is installed on. If you change the partition layout such that the partition number assigned to the Windows drive changes, that assumption causes things to break.
I agree, that is how Windows should behave…But then again, I probably wouldn’t have much use for a smarter, more aware system. Not yet at least. “I’m” the smarter, more aware one. I’ve got chronic backup-itis when it comes to computers. I may be a little obsessive-compulsive though
But a change to the mobo is always a fresh install in my book..
hmm.. that’s what i suspected with XP. but nevertheless.. boot time is greatly reduced in XP which is nice for some people. but the setbacks can be awful too.
thanks for the thought.
Linux’s boottimes are slower not so much because it does more hardware detection (that probably adds less than 5 sec. or so), but because the Linux initscripts usually aren’t as smart. Windows races to get you into the GUI. Stuff like the networking subsystem (and all the servers, etc) isn’t initialized until *after* the desktop is loaded. Meanwhile, linux initializes stuff in order, starting from devices, moving to system services, and then finally to the desktop. Also, Windows has a nice feature where it saves traces of what order the disk gets access during app startup. It reorganizes the disk so it can read all those blocks in one go. That tends to help application startup, and I’d suspect it does something for system startup as well.
To play the devil’s advocate, I had the opposite experience once. Removed a hard drive with Win2k from a computer at work, put it in my computer at home. Windows booted, installed a few drivers, reboot, and then I had a fully working Win2k.
Don’t know what he had done to his windows, but ive placed swapped hdd from different computers and windows still works, usually the reactivation pops back up but i reactivate over the internet and everything is working.
swap comps alot, 1hdd/many pc’s I just set up hardware profiles… 9X is easy for that… but 9X suxx
XP there is a program, but the name eludes me now
I had more or less exactly the same experience with an SuSE 8.x system 1 1/2 years ago. I got a new computer and put my harddrive with the SuSE system into it – it worked without a flaw. A friend of mine was changing his computer (and keeping his installation), too, and all he had to do was installing a new driver for his mainboard chipset so that he had DMA support, everything else worked
So the general theory goes Windows has far better hardware support than linux. Until l8ly i’ve broadly agreed with that! However on friday i wiped my PC running Windows XP and Mandrake Linux 9.1, so that i could install Windows 2000 Pro, on the advice of Tony Grimer.
Here’s what happened:
Windows installed fine, even if it did take forever (linux takes about 1/4 of the time when i install about 4Gb of packages).
Windows boots (256 colours at 800×600) didn’t recognise my Nvidia GeForce 4 MX 420!
Try to connect to the net to d/led Nvidia drivers! WTF??? Where are my modems? (I have two internal and external)
After fiddling for 10mins manage to find a driver which runs my external modem on the windows disk.
Download proper drivers for my external modem. YAY! it works.
Download Nvidia drivers 13Mb takes about an hr with my 56k. Yawn!
Manage to get a decent Res with 32bit colour
Right let’s install halo! Oh now you have no sound card!!! F**k
I manage to find my driver cd for my sound card after about 10mins but windows doesn’t autofind them
So i open up my pc and find out the chip set. Right it’s this driver! Windows: “This driver has not been signed by microsoft it may not work properly” i install it anyway and it works.
While is was inside my box i found out my internal modem details and manage to download drivers for that too, taking another 15mins
Right surely my Canon i250 bubble jet will work, let’s plug it in. Drivers cannot be found for USB device!!!
Ok luckily i have to cd at hand, and can get my printer working.
So now i have sound, graphics, 2 modems and a printer after around 2 hrs, time for my scanner! This bit make me laugh! Windows can’t even detect that i have my IBM scanner plugged in
Right sod this let’s install Linux
Pop the cd in, boot up, configure partitions (5mins)
Install packages…
…15mins l8r all packages installed…
…detecting hardware…
“Mandrake found the following hardware:
Nvidia GeForce 4 MX 420
USB Scroll Mouse
56k WinModem (not supported) *my internal modem
56k Intel Modem
Cannon BJ 250 *earlier model but still works
SIS Sound Card
IBM Desk Scanner”
so that took me about 25mins and all my hardware was found and correctly installed!
So is windows really better at hardware compatibility???
I’d have to say “hell no!”
As Herman already wrote it is easily possible to change the motherboard.
The German computer magazine c’t had an article on that subject some time ago and provided a tool to restore the generic ide driver.
Simply get the .zip archive, extract it and run MergeIDE.bat BEFORE you replace your motherboard.
ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/listings/0218-206.zip
I never had problems using it.
That is a very interesting feedback. Windows usually comes pre-installed and pre-configured for one’s hardware. So few really have to install it.
What you just showed is indeed that should someone have to install windows off the shelf (the way people buy Linux), Windows is much more difficult to install than Linux!
THIS IS A KEY POINT !
Linux is easier to install, is more reliable and stable, is as easy to use, has now all common office applications, works on yesterday’s computers, and is cheaper.
No wonder large organisations are migrating away from Windows.
Ummm… so, was that a story? That was imho a handfull of paragraphs of a guy saying “Hi, I’ve installed Linux”. I fail to see the actual content of that “story”.
Hells bells, I’ve written summary replies to ppl on forums that were longer than that piece.
Try doing something like changing your hard drive. That’ll mess things up. And changing AMD to Intel easily is to be expected — CPUs don’t need drivers, so the OS doesn’t have to do anything with them.
Ignorant statement sorry. CPU specifically don’t need drives sure but with out supporting chipsets(Memory controller,PCI bridge etc..) CPU’s can’t do much. So ultimately becasue CPU’s need specific chipsets to function they have drivers.
Ever wonder why windows install starts in text based mode? then switches to GUI? hint:It loads a minimized version of windows in order to later determine what devices drivers it needs to load…JUST LIKE LINUX! This allows system specific optimization and avoids loading un-needed devices drivers(Unlike some Linux distros which load everything).
“Windows boots (256 colours at 800×600) didn’t recognise my Nvidia GeForce 4 MX 420!
Your surprised a >3 year old OS doesn’t recognize a <2 year old video card. Try installing RedHat 5.2
Mainly what i gather from this “article” is that due to the authors ignorance of Windows for whatever reason(my guess is he may have the same negative attitude that alot of Linux zealots have that Windows is buggy,simplistic and its not worth knowing intimately). So…am i suprised that the author screwed up his windows install becasue he changed from one vendors chipset to another? Not at all. (note: see specific optimizations as part of initial Windows install)
To be honest i am surprised that crap like this would appear on serious tech website. This “article” belongs on the Windows for dummies help forum.
I replaced my mobo about 18 months ago. It rebooted but never worked properly so I had to reinstall XP.
Re-installing a windows xp system on new hardware is FAIRLY easy–
You set your BIOS to boot from CDROM.
You put in the windows xp cd.
When it starts up the installation crap
you go through all the options as if you were going to reinstall it.
you obviously don’t format your harddrive though.
then when it gives you the option of installing a new windows XP, or repairing an existing one, you hit the R key to repair.
Windows XP does the rest.
I’ve had to do this an about 7-8 different computers of different platforms and have not yet had problems with this.
I think this is the price you pay for faster boot times, less hardware detection. This is really only necessary when you swap motherboards. swapping ram doesnt matter, most of the time swapping CPUs doesnt either.
Yes you have to actually phone MS to be ALLOWED to re-install, its kinda stupid, but atleast they have people on call 24hours a day, so its not the end of the world.
I recently trashed my Knoppix 3.3 harddrive installation (I got 4 computers at home,) by trying to force an xlibs upgrade, and forcing a Wine upgrade. That sucked. I’ll stick with Apt-get. If anyone knows of a tutorial on how to fix circular unmet dependancies, lemme know. Luckily theres a newer version of Knoppix out there, so I just re-burned it on my cdrw.
later
Old computer: Celeron-400 MHz, 128 MB RAM, Windows ME, 10 Gb HDD, cable internet, CD-R.
New computer: Celeron 2.7 MHz, 256 MB RAM, Windows XP Home, 40 Gb HDD, cable internet, CD-RW.
Cost of upgrade: $480 (hardware) and $0 for labour.
Reason for upgrade: power supply died and took processor with it (burned it down). User was happy with old computer.
Upgrade process:
1. Get to computer store, buy Presario s6000nx Minitower. Time it took: 1.5 hours, from which 0.5 hours spent rejecting “extended warranty.”
2. Bring it home, turn it on. Time spent: 15-20 minutes. 17 minutes road trip, 3 minutes to unpack and connect cables.
3. Wait until new computer sets itself up: 20-30 minutes. Enable firewall, install antivirus, enable Windows Updates, connect computer to the cable modem to verify Internet connectivity.
4. Shut down computer, plug second hard drive from the old dead box.
5. Turn on computer. Second harddrive recognized.
6. Copy My Documents and Favorites from old disk to new.
7. Fire Outlook Express, import Address Book and mail folders.
8. Set up ISP settings (if not for dead CPU, could just export/import them). Luckily, for cable modem ISP settings are very simple.
9. Shut down computer.
10. Remove old hard drive.
11. Turn on computer.
12. Enjoy!
—————————
Could have been done even easier if old computer were alive and I brought external CD-RW to back up settings. Anyway, HDD-to-HDD copy is much faster than through CDs.
—————————
Now, I believe I deserve an article in OS News for that!
Well, of course new CPU was Celeron 2.7 GHz, not MHz.:) New computer also had different RAM (DDR instead of SDRAM).
All in all: it is cheaper nowadays to buy a new computer and transfer your data to it than upgrade old one with all new components just to keep your old HDD, which could die any moment because of old age and of course usually not that fast and not that large as HDD coming with new computer.
Most Linux distros now ship modular kernels, which means they load modules as and when needed. If a module is not ‘asked for’, it is not ‘initialised’. Swap module for driver, and you see that its not very different for Windows.
The point is, why can Windows not do the same thing. Why could it not see that there was a new motherboard. The NForce is younger than Windows, but most of the stuff is pretty generic, otherwise Windows would be uninstallable at all. Its like any graphics card. They all have VGA modes you can use until you get the proper driver. Otherwise your monitor would not work at all. Dare I say, drivers are usually for the ‘enhanced functionality’. I expected that windows would at least boot to allow me to install the drivers
Linux is more robust and can handle things like that, not to mention almost all the hardware suport for Linux is built in.. no 3rd party drivers. (generaly)
Just to clear up the misconceptions I’ve seen posted above since a lot of you don’t seem to have a lot of experience doing this….I do. So here’s what you want to know:
1. Windows 2000/XP/2003 will ALWAYS blue screen on boot if you make a major hardware change in your system. You have to think like the kernel thinks…..if you switch to a new motherboard and try to boot, the system can’t lockdown the new devices in order because hardware detection doesn’t take place at boot.
2. YES, Linux can mess this up too, but only once in a while. If you’re proficient with Linux, you can just boot to console from an install CD and fix it up. This is no good for average users.
3. NO, you don’t have to redo your entire OS just to get back up and running. If you paid attention, 2000/XP have a recovery installation option as well as a recovery console. You can get to both of these by booting to the installation cd. Recovery installs usually bring the registry back along with all of your prgrams, and MOST times will move your My Docs data to a new user folder. Recovery console usually doesn’t help with these scenarios.
4. SOMETIMES, if you install a new motherboard with a similar northbridge, you can still boot the system. In this case 2000/XP is just dandy at picking out all your new motherboard assets.
5. Whoever says that simply switching your HD can blue screen their 2000/XP…..I have pictures of you with your pants of fire (liars). This is NOT true. I do this dozens of times every week, and have been for the past 4 years. I’m sure my experience outweighs trying to fix your moms computer.
6. Blue screens on boot to 2000/XP almost always mean a hardware problem.
Just thought I’d share the help and dispell a lot of the junk flying around on here. Good day to you madame/sir.
I run XP, OS X and various versions of Linux. Am not a wizard, more the ‘fellow traveller’ type.
Anyway, my four month old WinXP MediaCenter Dell (which is a production machine, so I don’t play with it) has a flaky modem which, with time, was getting worse.
Three long marchs through outsourced tech support (including a replacement modem) failed to solve the problem, leaving the tech at the other end of the line to tell me ‘well, the only thing left to do is reinstall XP.’
Which I did. Twice. The system got progressively less stable, Media Center wouldn’t run, the box felt about half there.
I then spent a maddening 45 minutes wih second tier tech support. The guy couldn’t understand me, I couldn’t understand him, and all my begging didn’t get me a different support person.
Finally, in desperation, I called Dell’s customer care line, which hooked me up with a tech on the floor, who told me in about 45 seconds flat what no one else had – that I had to install drivers for the Intel chipset before anything else would work reliably.
He was right, the system went back to its prior stable state and I bought a new modem off the shelf which solved my problem.
Contrast that to a SUSE install on an identical 4600: I dropped the cds in, answered a few questions, and 15 minutes later I had a working system.
There are lots of things to like about XP, in particular the system rollback points. But for us mere mortals, Linux strikes me as an easier install.
My experience exactly. I did a major hardware change. I changed just about everything that makes a PC a PC. And I got the blue screen.
The problem with recovery is that it overwrites all your updated files, and you will have to run Windows update all over again. I guess this is not too much of a problem if you had slipstreamed the updates onto a new ‘XP CD’. This is also pretty trivial to fix though. Just run windows update. Very time consuming though.
Doing something like this is just asking for trouble. When you’re changing that much hardware, you really should re-install your OS. you’re crazy not to!!!
I don’t see it as a fair comparison at all. Only a complete neophyte would try to shoehorn his old OS installation onto his new system.
It’s just like all those silly people who upgrade ontop of previous versions of the same OS. Again… you’re just asking for trouble.
A new box deserves a clean install…
And it doesn’t take hours to install any OS these days. Both Windows and Linux are pretty quick about it, especially on modern hardware.
I did the same thing last week. I upgraded an Athlon 1.2 Thunderbird to an Athlon XP 2800+. New mobo (integrated LAN and sound), new processor, PC2700 RAM, and a shiny new Lian-Li aluminum case to run it all inside. As an aside, after 15 years of building and supporting PCs (usually with NEXTSTEP/OpenSTEP, SCO, Solaris x86 or Linux), the Lina-Li case was such a joy to work with.
I went through complete driver hell with my Windows 2000 SP4 side. Reboot after reboot to get the new AGP bus and old NVidia GeForce Ti4200 to agree. Windows kep auto-inserting an AGP2.0-3.0 bride on boot that corrupted the video or prevented the video driver from loading. heinous.
The other side is Mandrake 9.2, and it worked perfectly. Once pass through kudzu, and everything was perfect. All accellerated video, and automatically discovered communication and sound chipsets.
This is not a manufactured testimonial to make Windows look bad. I’ve beenworking with Windows as part of my daily job since Win 3.0. it has never needed any assistance to look and behave awful. Back in the day, Windows sucked in comparison to OS/2 and NEXTSTEP. Now it sucks in comparison to Mac OS X and Linux.
Microsoft’s app departments do an admirable job of making apps (aside from some imagined Ballmer-induced corporate policy on injecting bloat into each successive generation of code). But the OS, while getting better, is really only where Windows 95 should have been in 1996. If it didn’t suck, it wouldn’t be so hated. There is ample reason and precident, especially among the IT sysadmins and integrators in the trenches.
The reason why this occurs is that changing several core components (motherboard, mainly – NOT HDD), means that the core drivers for communicating with the CPU itself (your HAL – or Hardware Abstraction Layer) won’t initialize, because it can’t recognize the new chipset, and the system falls over.
This is generally caused when moving Intel –> VIA –> SiS, or major leaps like P2 –> P4, or K6 –> Athlon. If Windows didn’t load core drivers by default, it would be slower, and less stable, and you’d just end up with another, more expensive version of Linux.
“”Windows boots (256 colours at 800×600) didn’t recognise my Nvidia GeForce 4 MX 420!
Your surprised a >3 year old OS doesn’t recognize a <2 year old video card. Try installing RedHat 5.2
”
Would you mind telling me where, as a legitimate owner of Windows 2000, I can download for free a new Win2k ISO with updated drivers and bug fixes?
Actually, scratch that, I’m wrong… it is possible to create an updated Win2K install CD, amazing what a little searching will turn up….
http://igloo.its.unimelb.edu.au/Webmail/tips/msg00648.html
You just proved my point about the ignorance of Linux users. You’re judging how Windows is today on what it was like 4 years ago, with the release of Windows 2000.
How about you go try installing something reasonable, like Windows Server 2003, or even the annoying Windows XP…
Heh, yeah; quite surprising how people who are so keen to play kernel-of-the-day are so reluctant to take a couple of hours to build their own “distro” of Windows…
http://www.msfn.org/unattended/ for more detailed info.
I don’t use windows, but have a couple of friends who do. When their machines were first setup under windows, all updates & drivers were applied, all apps that they use, email settings and dialup settings for one of them, were configured, then I do the following:
1. Shrink the windows partition.
2.. Install Debian stable on a small partition at the end of the drive.
3. Boot windows and defrag.
4. Boot Debian, mount the windows drive at /mnt/windows
5. tar cf windows.tar /mnt/windows && bzip2 windows.tar, which makes a zip file of the entire C: drive.
6. Write two bash scripts named DeleteWindows & Restore Windows.
From then on, if the windows drives ever get hosed, I can copy into Debian whatever windows files need to be saved, run the script to wipe the windows drive, then run the script to restore it, which unzips windows.tar.bz2 back onto the windows partition. Depending on the speed of the machine, and how many apps were first installed, this usually takes no more than 5 mins. After the windows drive is unzipped, the system is restored to it’s original pristine state, with all drivers and settings installed. I don’t have to sit through hours more of a new install, rebooting after every update and app installation.
BOFH blithered in amusing superiority:
“You just proved my point about the ignorance of Linux users. You’re judging how Windows is today on what it was like 4 years ago, with the release of Windows 2000.
How about you go try installing something reasonable, like Windows Server 2003, or even the annoying Windows XP…”
Uhhh, why in hell would I install XP? it’s worthless, ugly, slow and in no way a better platform than Windows 2000. Unless, of course, you are saying that Microsoft really needs my $179 for yet another product that is buggy, slow and of no substantial improvement than the kruft that you’re “upgrading” from.
Are you telling me that XP would not have caused any hiccups or problems with a new motherboard integration?
If so, you have a valid point. But, please pardon me if I fail to believe that XP would have gotten it right. My experiences with XP show it to be a dumbed-down “consumer” version of 2000, without the managability, and with no improvement in stability or performance.
Hoping that windows xp will boot correctly after a motherboard change is a though that would not have cross my mind … This was possible under windows 98 (the os would re-detect everything) although I always prefer the do a clean install after such major change …
As for Linux my upgrade to a 19″ flat panel, onboard serial ata harddisk and 54Mbits wireless has made it impossible for me to find a distro that just work on this config … So I reserve Linux for my servers and XP is on my Desktop.. although I use every open source project on my desktop when possible (like open office).
Have fun with your new computer !
Thans an excellent idea, Anonymous. I’m going to do that now. I should have been doing it all along.
UNIX is the only way to get anything actually accomplished.
No, I’m saying that Windows XP has had a further 2 years of development than Windows 2000, and Windows 2003 has a further 2 years development than XP. There’s better hardware support, better stability, better compatability, speed improvements, etc.
If you think that XP is nothing more than a dumbed down version of XP, purely because of it’s pathetic “Luna” GUI (which you can replace with any one of a million Visual Styles, or even create your own in any good resource editor), then you need to re-assess your priorities.
If, of course, you simply haven’t bothered to notice that the task-based additions to the interface – which are enabled by default – can be turned off with minimal effort, then you need to do some more research.
Oh, incidentally, the Geforce 4 Ti4200 was released AFTER Windows 2000, so why should you expect it to come with drivers for it? XP and 2K3 handle my Ti4600 quite happily.
If “manageability” is your concern, why don’t you take a look at cmd.exe, the command-line for XP? Or if you want to step-up into KControl ‘complexity’, head over to GPEdit.msc…
Windows XP Professional isn’t a less-featured version of 2K; it’s quite the opposite.
Were I work we buy a how bunck of 2k licesnes than use an image for all machines, machines that are not the same. Normaly they boot right into 2k, and if they don’t you run a repair. Reapring does not make you reload software. This Linux zealot dosn’t know his way around windows, Windows is my job. I could be just like him and say I have problems upgrading Linux. But I understand the fact I am a Windows/Netware Admin and just a Linux user. Hail ReactOS, the future.
My friend upgrade his 486dx 4 100 it had 24mb ram he was running windows 95 but was a big dos internet user. lynx
arachne. I am surprised people still use a 486 but there is a theory that oses are to overbloated.
Geos is a great os. Now that breadbox owns the code they will be realeasing a 32 bit os using a dos extender.
They have fixed newdeal office 2000 same thing as geos ensemble 3.0 its biggest gripe was the web browser skipper
they took a plain html view an turned it into a good web browser for the 16 bit os everyone who uses newdeal office 2000 Alot bougt the modified version Breadbox ensemble.
Its not really the hardware its the operating system.
Since I am suffering right now through a Windows 2000 install I am feeling inspired to add a bit more to the conversation. After having spent over an hour just on the basic install and having the monitor zonk out after final reboot I can quite honestly say that Windows is well behind Linux in the install department. It always amazes me how Windows 2000 and Xp can appear to be merrily installing without a problem, video works all the way through the install, and then it oversyncs the monitor or some such glitch after its wasted another hour of your ever decreasing lifespan. (diabolical it is)
So with that said I will try not to sound overly critical of Windows in the next several comparisons.
Windows does have some advantages over Linux. Better hardware support for newer devices, (because the hardware manufacturers have supported it longer) more software available (same reason as hardware) and a slightly more user friendly GUI. (simply because Microsoft has been at that longer. On the other hand, under the hood where things count, Linux is superior. Those “advantages” Windows currently has will diminish over time.
Examples.
The Installer
Since I have just finished installing (cough cough) Windows 2000 my memory of the experience is still pretty fresh. I do not remember being given the choice as to whether I would like to have a seperate partition for “Documents and Settings”. I also don’t remember that choice in WinXP Pro. (cough cough)
Advantage number 1 for Linux (and a very big advantage) is the flexibility to control partitioning during install if you so desire.
Windows users might not get this at first. During the install of 2000 or XP you do not get a choice. Linux allows you the custome configure your partitions. I generally use a simple scheme. I create a /, a /home, and a swap partition. All system settings are generally stored in the / partition. All user data and config settings are stored in the /home partition. Should you have a reason to reinstall or maybe upgrade to a newer version you can choose to leave the /home partiton completely alone. If you were using Linux in its standard multiuser mode and not running as root you would find all of your data and config settings intact after your reinstall. I have done it this way for years without any problems. Windows, on the other hand defaults to blowing everything away during reinstall. Sure you could choose the repair method with XP but you are still taking a chance with the same single partition that contains your admin system systems as well as ALL your user data. I know I don’t trust Windows THAT much, do you?
Since the Linux installers are so fast and tend to make the basic system settings very easy to recreate during install, the Linux method is way ahead of Windows.
Advantage number 2 for Linux is the ability to install the entire OS in a much shorter time period. The only person who likes the Windows installer is the tech support person who is charging by the (wasted) hours it takes to install Windows. Once the over charged consumer gets an glimpse of how little time it takes to install Linux and how comparatively easy it is to install…well lets just say its going to be hard to get the horse back in the barn! The rather artificially “bloated” Windows tech support economy is going to collapse as a result and a number of overpaid and under skilled Windows tech support people will find themselves without jobs.
Advantage number 3
As I have just experienced with my failed install of Windows 2000, hardware detection is more than being able to use the latest whizbang devices. Windows 2000 has chosen to either oversync my monitor, resulting in a black useless screen or has used the incorrect driver. Were this Linux I might have a chance of using ctrl+alt+f1 or f2 or f3 etc to at least go to a command line interface and muddle my way back to something. Here I am basically screwed. Now before you say that Windows 2000 should be able to work with stuff from its time period and I shouldn’t expect it to work with a newer video card, I should let you know that the system I am using is slightly older than W2k and works fine with every Linux distro I have thrown at it. Basically W2k and WinXP have horrible out of the box handling of video cards and monitors.
The Windows Bootup Advantage
One of the often mentioned “advantages” mentioned by Windows rah rah users is the “faster” bootup of Windows. There are a number of holes in that argument.
1. Windows may appear to boot up faster but is not usable for quite a while after you have logged into your desktop. As another poster mentioned Windows does a minimal amount of work during basic startup and leaves much of the work until after you have logged into the desktop. Linux does most of the work prior to getting to the login and is much faster getting the user to actual productivity. Try the following:
Take 2 systems of equal power and memory
Start them up. (I have no doubt Windows got to the user login faster)
Now that both are at the login screen, type username and password and click login at exactly the same time. As soon as you see the desktop click on an email application. (I have no doubt Linux had the application open and working before Windows even finished painting the taskbar and system tray icons)
You say “But Windows booted up faster!” I say “Why did you shut Windows down in the first place, I never HAVE to shutdown Linux so I rarely HAVE to wait for a bootup!”
Swap Drive
During the install of any version of Windows you are never asked whether you would like a separate swap drive. Windows, by default, uses whatever open space remains on the hard drive for its version of a swap drive. Linux, on the other hand, not only allows you to create a segregated swap partition, it allows you to control how much space it uses.
Now why is this better?
What happens to Windows when a user, over time, installs more software and creates more data until the drive space reaches the point where there is, lets say, less than a hundred megs left open? It slows down….WAY DOWN, almost to the point of being unusable. The mouse becomes eratic, print jobs fail, programs glitch out etc etc etc.
When you run out of room with Linux it just keeps on working. (I know, I have….oops…..done it)
Score one….a big one for the Penguin.
I could easily go on but I am sure I have exceeded my 8000 character limit and I do have that “easy to use” Windows OS to get back to. The install is long and my day is becoming shorter. You folks who are fans have Windows may have some valid points but many of you do not straddle both sides of the fence. I do. Linux has some huge technical advantages and very few disadvantages when compared with Microsoft’s Windows operating systems. Linux is improving FAST and driver/software support is growing daily. Microsoft had better get its act together with whatever Longhorn becomes. They won’t get a second chance….this time.
(now back to the nice black screen GUI OS)
@Russian Guy: That wasn’t an upgrade. You just bought a new machine and copied your documents over!
@BOFH: What are you jabbering about? Why is the Windows HAL fixed at install time? And how would loading the hall at runtime make the system slower or any less stable?
Rayiner,
It was a sarcastic joke: a person takes hard drive from old PC, plugs it to what is very much new PC (“New processor, new motherboard, new graphics card, new memory and so on”), gets into trouble which can be easily fixed for someone who knows what is he doing, and prominently displayed in OSNews for the trouble he gets in.
How about following his own words “I more or less bought a new PC” and comparing his experience with the one where a person really bought a new PC?
I actually bought a new computer, and if unsuccessful HDD transfer plus BSOD deserves OSNews discussion- successful PC replacement without problems deserves one too.
I think the point was that existing Windows installs don’t like being transplanted to new machines, or copied to new harddrives. That’s a very legitimate point, and makes it very frustrating to deal with Windows installations. The fact that so many people on this board espouse the “common knowledge” that new machines require an OS reinstall is proof of that. In the Linux world, people don’t think that way.
I remember I had an old 486 that I ran as a server. I didn’t want to actually run through the install procedure on that old machine, so I installed Linux to a drive on my PII machine, and just put the drive in the 486 afterwards. It worked just dandy.
Firstly I wrote the article, and I can confirm that I pretty much fixed the ‘problem’ myself. It was an annoyance, not too major, but not too minor either.
I think all those who are advocating reinstalling windows every time you upgrade miss the point really. Its a matter of expectations now isn’t it. A linux user would simply expect it to all work after just plugging in his old hard drive into the new machine. A windows user expects nothing to work then, and he reinstalls. If you see nothing wrong with reinstalling, (wrong in this case not being evil or anything) then reinstalling makes sense for you, and you do so. But there really is no fundamental reason why you should have to reinstall. Its really like back in the day when you had to reboot windows to change a driver for your sound card. I suspect many of those who don’t think Windows should work when you transfer your HD did not see anything wrong in needing to restart the computer a few times whenever you installed a new driver.
But then again, I am the fool who expects things to work out of the blue when transferring hard drives.
Now, this was an article comparing two attributes, if you will, of two operating systems. Is this website called OSNEWS by the way, as in operating system news? Maybe?
With BeOS, I never had such a problem…
I just visited to this site which give detailed instruction to create unattended setup cds of WinXP/Server2k3 the address is http://unattended.msfn.org/ it includes everything from registry tweaks to installing hotfixes. it is great. have a look at it. Now supposing it will take 1 hour to install completly (setup does in 20 min on my P4/512MB RAM) this is the time to see other things in world rather than the screen. (kidding) but you can keep windows to install when you go to bed & in morning have a fully reinstalled OS!!!
This would really be nice. I would like to point out that this is more or less provided by Linux distros. At least Redhat/Fedora have kickstart. You basically answer all the questions onto a file, and start the install. You only have to come back an login, or at least in Rdhat/Fedora’s case, do the post install to add users and so on. Wonder when Microsoft will see it fit to give us tools like that on install cds. I daresay this is not too useful for corporations because many just ghost off a networked drive or something. But it is useful for the rather small operation which cannot jusfity cracking a nut with a sledgehammer.
The beauty was going from my K6 to K7 with mem, motherboard, vidcard and soundcard to boot was that whilst Windows 2000 crapout as described and required a re-install from me, BeOS booted and returned me to a fully functional desktop with everything recognised and functioning as it was before the upgrade. I don’t think Linux or Windows could have provided such a seemless hardware upgrade. This is why I’m waiting for Zeta or something to come out cause I love the ease of BeOS.
Tried recently installing Debian on my computer and Stable wouldn’t recognise my Network card and whilst Testing was a write off, Unstable allowed me set things up for a network install but the crappedout writing Pearl packages to disk and told me there was a problem with writing to /target. Bloody frustrating in the least.
This is not a fair comparison. Windows users are used to reinstalling and reformatting every once since the 9x days. Linux however being more secure is not like this. Linux users expect stability, etc. Also, it’s not fair to compare this problem due to lack of experience. I could say the same for trying for windows users going to linux. I’m sure they’ll have a few complaints and say linux sucks.
As windows gets more stable, this problem should be fixed up as windows users will expect their computers to be better than this. This is an issue of what you expect from windows and linux.
Windows 2000 and presumably XP (and possibly NT4) all had autodetected modules. Changing out the CPU and mobo on the thing would not likely be wise. But it beats having to wait around for something like kudzu or discover to figure out your hardware hasn’t changed on the 400th reboot just so you can try to finagle your installation on a PC upgrade.
I mean, if you take the short while it takes to customize your kernel to your hardware, you might find yourself in a pinch and resulting to a rescue disk, in a much less friendly environment than the Windows rescue CD. Because you were too lazy to even bother to take one of the biggest advantages the linux kernel offers, you’ve lucked out. As a linux and windows user myself, I have no expectation that either will enjoy having the hardware swapped out from underneath them.
I’ve got news for you. There is no benefit to customizing the kernel for your hardware beyond setting the CPU type. Since most distros offer a variety of kernels optimized for P4, etc, there is absolutely no benefit to compiling your unless you have a special setup the default kernel doesn’t handle.
When I upgrade my computer, I buy one thing at a time. I use it for a while and then I upgrade another part. This way I get to feel small speed increases all the time, instead one big one. I have a 2001 Quicksilver G4. It originally had a 867 mhz processor, 128 mb ram, 12x speed burner, geforce mx2 and OS 10.1. Now it has a lite-on 40x speed burner, external dvd player, radeon 8500, 1.5 gb ram, OS 10.3 and dual 800mhz g4. Each update has served me well and brought nice productive speed increases. If I upgraded everything at once, I would consider getting a new computer.
Ahhh, the saga of the overzealous Win2k monitor setting…resolved…finally.
After hitting f8 (vga mode) a number of times I finally got Win2k to behave. After putzing around for over an hour with different sync rates, resolutions, and numbers of colors I finally found the sweet spot for Win2k, my monitor and video card. I found that 60 hertz with 640×480 at 256 colors seemed to work fine. I then gradually worked my way carefully back up to 1024×768 with 16 bit color. The funny thing is that while I was trying to find that “sweet spot I tried every setting I had worked my way through to when I finally suceeded. I guess you have to do it in order or it doesn’t work…maybe…probably…I guess.
The even funnier thing is that the final setting I arrived at is exactly what it said it was when I first started in f8/VGA mode. Of course it didn’t look like it was 1024×768.
Yep Windows is certainly the superior platform alright.
I’ve done this twice with Windows that I can remember, once with Win98 and once with 2k. With Win98, it basically went like this:
– put harddrive in new machine
– boot to a nice “Windows Protection Fault”
– shutdown, boot in safe mode
– that works, so reboot
– grab a cup of coffee or a novel to kill the ten minutes of “Installing New Hardware”
2k was a bit more of a pain for me – initially, it refused to boot in regular mode. Eventually, I just went into the Device Manager in safe mode and deleted all the devices, then let Windows re-detect them. I probably could have done the same thing by deleting some part of the registry, but that didn’t occur to me at the time.
Oh, and I’m sorry, but Windows hardware detection/device installation sucks and has done so for quite a while. Not that I DIDN’T enjoy having to tell Win9x the location of files that were already installed when making changes to network settings (co-workers probably got very sick of hearing me say “Why are you asking for that file, it’s in the bloody windowssystem folder!”). Oh, and Windows 2k? Yeah, plugging a scanner in with a different USB cable != “new hardware”, contrary to what “new hardware found” seems to think. I’ll just stop everything I’m doing so I can log off and log back on as admin so I can use the scanner, thanks to the informative error which told me “You don’t currently have rights to install this device, but I’m too braindead to do something sensible like prompt for an admin username and password or give you any indication whatsoever of how to accomplish the task you’re attempting.”
Ok. I see that everyone has opinions, and I have one too!
I see alot of people saying that they can not switch the HD (with XP or 2k) to a new computer. Why is this hard? I have done this countless times. The only thing to remember is that the bootloader in XP (also 2k but I will just put XP for now) expects the correct device and partition info. If you change the HD around, like its now a secondary master and it used to be a primary master, you will have to edit the boot.ini file to reflect this, otherwise you get a BSD.
Personally for me its common sense. Also, assuming your boot.ini is correct, you must also boot into safe mode only (first time around). This should be common sense. Once in safe mode you should have no problem removing all the devices in the device manager. You should now be able to reboot normally into XP and it will install everything it has drivers for. The end.
For all those that keep saying linux is so much better at detecting devices, I am divided on the issue. While my linux installations have detected and set my devices correctly, I usually always have to download some driver packages for unrecognized devices and compile them. I have an all digital sound set up, and have for 3 years now. I have pulled my hair out trying to get linux drivers to correctly use SPDIF out on my different sound cards. Not to mention that almost every distro I have tried has at least one or two things broken right from the install cd and having to hunt for hours through forums just to find the one line of text that caused all the problem.
Now to comment about multiple partition arguments. I have seen, and done myself, benchmarks that show beyond the shadow of a doubt that putting a swap file on a seperate partition reduces performance. Same goes for any OS. The physical characteristics of a HD will tell you that you must do more head repositioning (more reads)just to read a seperate partition. Not to mention head thrashing that occurs when moving back and forth between seperate partitions wasting valuable access time. The only scenario which could be argued for increased performance would be if you put your seperate partitions on different physical drives. This would benefit any OS, and yes this would benefit XP also. The benefit of not loosing your data becuase its on a seperate partition with linux also applies to XP. All of my XP boxes have a seperate partitions with my user profiles, so if I do reinstall I can just use my old profile and everything is back to the way it was before.
I have never been forced to remove any extra partitions during XP install, and if you have, I suggest you slow down and read becuase your missing something. You can make as many partitions you want from a windows PE cd, or after you install the OS you could just boot into it and run the diskmanager (which is what I do). The only advantage Linux has over xp (as far as paritioning goes) is it’s ability to use a wide variety of file systems seperately on each of its partitions, and that is really cool.
Linux is great for a hobby, and if you spend alot of time tweaking it, you can have a very good free server. XP is the same way, if you spend a little time tweaking it you can have it running faster than a 2k box and the entire OS using 64meg memory, not to mention XP will run just about anything from the dos days and the windows 98 stuff.
Then there is games, some guy was complaining in one of the earlier posts about how XP wouldn’t recognize his sound card and he couldn’t play HALO?!? Even if you didn’t have to download the sound card drivers for your linux box, are you going to play HALO on it? My point exactly.
And please don’t blabber off about emulation, unless you like watching a 1 frame per sec gallery show of what used to be your favorite game, then its really just for nostalgia isn’t it?
Ok, I have ranted enough..
Btw, Gentoo linux rocks! and so does XP!
Maynard,
I am sorry I was little bit hard on you: next time I would pay more attention to domain a person post from.
>I think all those who are advocating reinstalling windows every time you upgrade miss the point really.
My point was: is .ca, .us and .com people rarely do upgrade the way you do, they either buy a new computer really cheap and transfer their settings really fast, or have enough knowledge to transfer old HDD to newly assembled box and overcome BSOD.
I understand that .za (like .ru) is very different story, but I can tell you what I told one of my Russian friends who complained that MS and Red Hat patches are too big and too costly to download through his slow modem with his ISP charging for traffic, and there is no other way to get them: get real, I told him, these companies build software for paying customers in America and Western Europe, not for you- my Russian friend.
>Its a matter of expectations now isn’t it.
Exactly. You know, I would not mind downloading 3 Red Hat CDs or multimegabyte yet another MS Windows update file while I enjoy cable modem here in .ca with unlimited traffic.
>A linux user would simply expect it to all work after just plugging in his old hard drive into the new machine. A windows user expects nothing to work then, and he reinstalls.
You know, that is simply untrue in both cases.
>I am the fool who expects things to work out of the blue when transferring hard drives.
No, but you are the fool who expects a corporation offering commodity product to hundreds of millions of people to take care of your personal very minor case.
It is all about numbers, Maynard: find me 1 million people unhappy with HDD transfer in Windows, all of them paid for that OS, and I can guarantee you the problem will be solved by Microsoft in one or other way.
If you think you personally are so important that someone has to find workaround for you instead of you using one that is definitely there,- then you have a problem.
>Now, this was an article comparing two attributes, if you will, of two operating systems. Is this website called OSNEWS by the way, as in operating system news? Maybe?
May be next time someone will post an article about how Windows is a superior OS because it has one feature implemented better than in Fedora Core, and that feature is irrelevant for 99.999999999% of OS users 99.9999999% time of their OS usage.
Once again, I may be wrong and too hard on you. It is quite possible that in .za many people swap harddrives regularly and can’t live without it.
My apologies.
I have roughly similar hardware to that of the articles author, and I found MS Windows much much easier to install than Gentoo Linux. That’s not to say that Gentoo Linux isn’t possible, it was just the nForce 2 motherboard that seemed to cause all the problems. Anyway, I’m happily dual-booting now. PS – I don’t think Windows or Linux are better than each other – they are just suited for different purposes.
The article was talking of putting an old HD into a new computer and how the installed OS reacted to this switch. The author says that MS Windows reacted poorly, while GNU/Linux lived to fight another day.
BTW, my Debian box was upgraded from a KX133/Matrox G400 to a SIS735/Radeon7000 a year ago. I don’t have a module loading kernel (i know what i own and my kernels reflect that) and as some of you know Debian does not sport a hardware detection by default. Still, all i got was a notification that an unknown chipset was found and that the kernel was falling back to a generic chipset support. The X-server quitted with unknown screens and brought me back to a terminal. Reconfiguring XFree86 was all it took to get back to work. Eventually i recompiled the kernel.
I agree that this is not a flawless transition, but i didn’t had to reinstall and it never crossed my mind to do so. The required fixes took about 15-20 minutes and one reboot.
So, no hardware detection required.
A couple of years ago I was dual-booting Windows 98 SE and Mandrake Linux (probably 8.2, I forget exactly which version) on a home-built PC with a Celeron processor.
I got sick of the slow Celeron, so I got myself a new motherboard and an AMD processor (I think it was an Athlon XP 1600+). I re-built my PC with the new motherboard and CPU, but the other components were the same as before.
At the time I was familiar with Windows, and knew I would need to re-install after this hardware upgrade; however on a whim, I tried powering up the PC. Sure enough, Windows gave me a slew of errors, then blue-screened and locked up the PC. On the reboot, I chose Linux at the LILO prompt, and was shocked to see everything come up normally – Mandrake 8.2 in full glory, KDE and all, as if nothing had changed.
At least one corporation has recognized this feature of Linux installations. Lindows has a partnership with Seagate, selling brand-new hard drives with Linux pre-installed:
http://www.lindows.com/lindows_seagate.php
The idea is that white-box PC manufacturers can simply stick these hard drives into new PC’s, boot up, and find Linux already installed and running. I don’t know how successful this venture has been, but it does speak for the robustness and adaptability of Linux installs.
-Gnobuddy
“Swapping your board without so much as a reinstall” is over on ARS Technica at http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=779097…. Basically: replace the Bus Master drivers with standard generic drivers. Chipset Drivers need to be replaced with PCI standard PCI-to-PCI controller [disables everything AGP]. Uninstall both USB controllers, unless you are using a USB mouse or keyboard. Place hard drive in new system and reboot.
It’s a bit more complicated than that, but not much more.