A Little Taste of What It’s Like

      by Wyatt Walter

Converts from Windows Vista to XP may be getting a bit of a taste of what it has been like to be a Linux user. I heard a story from an acquaintance the other day of how his laptop didn’t run Windows Vista very well, so he decided to downgrade to Windows XP. Unfortunately, the drivers for the disk controller weren’t included in Windows XP and were only included with Vista. That isn’t a huge problem, one can usually get drivers for machines directly from the manufacturer’s site (in this case HP). Unfortunately, to install the drivers at Windows installation time, one needs to throw the driver onto a floppy drive and this was a laptop. The only solutions that I could come up with were 1) buy or borrow a USB floppy (not sure if that would work or not), or 2) slipstream the driver into the Windows XP installation CD. I’ve done step 2 and know for a fact that it will work, but it’s also a lot of work to do. Plus, one needs a working Windows installation to do it. Thus, begins a long, complex process just to get a fresh installation of Windows XP working on a laptop. My, how the tables have turned..

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Apr 28th, 2009

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