Announce The Vintage Computer Forum 1106

A lot of the time wasted is due to trivial reboots and re-installation of drivers for no apparent reason.

My favorite problem is Windows asking for the Windows install CD so it can copy over a few files that are already present & scattered through a number of different subdirectories under c:-windows. My favorite annoying sub-problem is that the dialog box won't remember what you entered before, so you always have to retype it. It is possible to fool this problem by entering the path to the location of each file thats already there, the installer then does a no-op for the files it thinks it wants. I buttume there is some reason why its not smart enough to handle that on its own...

My next favorite problem is when Windows asks for a driver disk for some card every time the system reboots, even after you gave it the disk the first time, and each time it prompted thereafter.

My third favorite is you get the driver installed, but the device still shows up as inoperative and-or conflicted in the control panel, or the hardware simply doesn't work- despite the fact everything is PCI and no hardware has changed.

My fourth favorite is when the OS asks for motherboard drivers every time the system reboots, even though the same OS has been installed on the motherboard before and it never asked for any such thing.

Depending on the OS version, you may expect a mixture of the above, or none of them, plus other seemingly random problems or none of them either- I've never been able to predict it.

Windows is a complete mess, only held together by ever increasing amounts of work patching and kludging and ever decreasing architectural integrity.

Gregm