I had the opportunity this past weekend to do something that I haven't done in a very long time: install Windows XP on a barebones system (Compaq EVO D510c). Now it had been a while since I've worked Compaq and I had forgotten how "special" their device drivers are. You have to go to their website, find the appropriate packages for your machine, download and install them.
I popped in the XP CD and went to town. All was going well until it was time to actually "run windows." Usually upon rebooting the first thing I do is get all the windows updates, (this is a whole different ballgame that I'll complain about in a moment).
Upon reboot, none of the network, display or sound drivers were installed. So I had no access to go and download the drivers, and a crappy display to look at. (Wasn't even concerned with sound at this point, so I didn't really notice).
Realizing what the problem was, I just went to another machine, downloaded what I needed to a CD, (the USB drivers weren't installed either, or I'd have used my USB stick), then ran the setups from the CD...bingo...worked. However, I am forced to wonder why a company as rich as Microsoft, having the number of resources it does, hasn't figured out a way to detect these device, at the very least, configure a sub-par network driver and go and fetch these drivers for you? Good thing I'm a geek and have 3 or 4 computers lying around that I could use to download what I needed. My mother would've been dead in the water with that thing and had to have spent $70 bucks an hour for someone from the Geek Squad to get it all setup. This is the OS that is most widely used?? WTF?!? A $90 billion a year company...and this is the crap the drop. At least I had SOME sort of display to look at so I suppose it could have been worse.
Finally with all the drivers and devices working, I began the updates....THIS is the annyoing part...well over 65 updates later...each of which had to be downloaded and then run, plus 3 or so hours of my time XP was finally up to date and running. A $90 billion dollar a year company with many many VERY HIGHLY PAID developers...and it takes me that damn long to get a machine up and running. Again, I say...WTF.
Part two of this task was to get an Ubuntu Linux installation on this machine. I popped in the CD and no kidding...20 minutes later, AT MOST, I had a perfectly usable working machine, COMPLETE with word processing, spreadsheets, email, etc, etc. And imagine this: all of the lastest updates installed! The cost of this system? Zero dollars and zero cents.
The only gotcha in the linux side was the NVidia drivers for my card didn't support my nice new 19" widescreen LCD monitor. I messed it for a while and then decided to just upgrade the entire system to the next release of Ubuntu, (so now I am using a "testing" version) and it works flawlessly. So think about that for a moment, I installed a complete OS and all its latest updates in 20 minutes, followed by a COMPLETE upgrade of that OS to their bleeding edge version in 20 more minutes. (Which is about 2 hours less time than it took me to install that "other" OS once!)
So tell me...how is it that a FREE OS with nowhere near the capital resources of Microsoft can produce a FAR superior operating system? Are the contributors to the open-source world just that much more talented? Or is Microsoft just band-aiding an old gaping wound using different pretty bandages with each release and calling it new?
I don't have the answer to that question and probably never will...to be honest, I don't need to know that answer. My main OS has been Ubuntu since it came out, and I've been using linux since 1995 when I built my first slackware box. Both OS's have come a long way since then, but the only one worth paying for, actually happens to be free.
