Swap a Video Card. Linux drools and Windows XP Rulez. 3437

On Thu, 09 Mar 2006 19:55:34 -0500, Richie Spano

Try installing XP on a box with a *legacy* Vanta 3d 16meg video card. Bios recognizes it right at boot. XP only gives me 800 x 600 16bit video until I search the net for a driver and install it. *Then* Windows update offers to upgrade my drivers in order to do DirectX stuff. If the average PC user went for updates, they wouldn't even know that it is available because Microsoft "recommends" the automated update and none of the other updates are even shown. Just the so-called "critical updates". As proof, have a look at some of the XP boxes owned by less knowledgeable people.

Try installing XP with a D-Link DFE-530TX network card. SOL. But it did offer to go on the internet to find a driver.... bwhahahahaha

This peeed me off - a had to try different cards before I could finally get on the net to get drivers. Good thing I happened to have several in my junk box. The funny thing was that once I was up and running and on the net, windows noticed I had a non-working nix card and offered to upgrade driver for the D-Link.

Kubuntu worked out of the box: 1024 x 768 x 32 right at log in. ALL my nix cards worked....

A new user wouldn't have a chance at getting XP to work starting from the same place. And if they didn't have 3rd party anti-virus and firewall software to install right at the beginning, before connecting to the net, they would have an investation of virii-trojans so great as to require a complete re-install. Just for the hell of it, try putting a box with only the install disk of XP on the web for half an hour. I doubt it would even make the half hour.

Checked out your less knowledgeable friend's XP computers lately? Try msconfig or task manager or netstat to see all the crud running.