Successful install

[garyng]

XP and Linux installation is like day and night. Linux advocate may not like it but Microsoft has spent a lot of money and effort in this area(. I am wondering if they beat even Apple.

I must say that I have never had the pleasure of the XP install I basing my opinion on what I had read from Joe Barr and to me it seemed like the same old thing to me and I still don't think some clueless noob to computers could manage it.

That article is IMO a bit bias against XP, or least give people the wrong impression, if we are comparing how easy it is to install a brand new OS on a brand new machine. First there is the network thing, it took me for quite some time to figure out how to setup networking under linux but I never encoutered a problem in XP(don't even need to do any setup, other than giving the needed username/passord for the ISP with ADSL connection). Then there is the time, while the actual time taken to 'update' or patch an XP system may be longer, it is pretty straight forward. On linux, even the highly praised apt-get is still very confusing. But that is just only the beginning. There is a lot of other tasks that go after the initial setup which XP leave linux far behind(because of its market dominance).

I plug a printer to the parallel port and the right driver is being installed and I can start printing. I would appreciate someone to tell me how the same can be done in linux. Have to remember printing is one of the major task.

The same goes for other things like my USB reader, I have to compile a new kernel for that under linux. Or my digital camera, or scanner.

All the mentioned task are IMO essential for today's PC operation. Even repair is relatively easy. I just reboot the XP CD and install again on an existing one. In linux, I need to search for rescue floppy etc.

I believe the catch phrase in that article is that "installing XP is boring", this to me means no surprise(bad side).