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Your problem with Windows could be fixed in UNDER 30 minutes, and that is giving you extra time. For the "no sound" you simply use SIW which will tell you who makes the sound card, then Google does the rest. If you are talking about a laptop the OEMs never bother updating those, which means you have to go straight to the source. as for WinXP? XP ISO Builder which is also free like SIW will have you a custom XP disc with drivers in under 10 minutes, and is so simple my 15 year old made his own XP disc.

Now let me ask you a question, and be honest: How much CLI did you have to do to set up those "clueless relatives" of yours?

I don't have windows installed so I can use that program. In order to you SIW or XP Iso Builder, I have to install xp. I wasted a lot of time trying to install XP and Vista where as with ubuntu or sidux, I pop in a live cd and it works.

As far as CLI time spent, none. I installed linux mint on both my mom's machine and my in-laws with no issues.

You see it is quite easy to have clueless relatives on Linux...if you are willing to be unpaid tech support for life. MY time costs $50 an hour, and I don't do freebies, which means just TWO hours of hunting forums or dealing with CLI hoops costs me MORE than a copy of windows Home.

I don't spend any time supporting them (other than reminding them to turn on the damn num locks key over the phone (which I should have just set to auto-on but I didn't expect that to be such an issue>) The reason I switched them, in fact, was because I was tired of fixing their XP and later vista install (which took 2-6 hours since they ignored every virus update warning they would get and then when they would run across an web site that told them they had viruses, they would install whatever software was on that site that offered to fix it.) I tried setting them to auto-update, but they would turn off their machines and kept missing the update windows. (They are retired and have inconsistent hours.)

As to how much I charged, I don't charge family because they are my family. My family has also been their to help using their skill sets that I lack. And even if they weren't, they are family.

I switched everyone to linux because my time is not worthless and when they were running XP and Vista, I had days (not hours) of my life wasted.

Your problem with Windows could be fixed in UNDER 30 minutes, and that is giving you extra time. For the "no sound" you simply use SIW which will tell you who makes the sound card, then Google does the rest. If you are talking about a laptop the OEMs never bother updating those, which means you have to go straight to the source. as for WinXP? XP ISO Builder which is also free like SIW will have you a custom XP disc with drivers in under 10 minutes, and is so simple my 15 year old made his own XP disc.

Now let me ask you a question, and be honest: How much CLI did you have to do to set up those "clueless relatives" of yours? How many times when Ubuntu upgrade came around did you have one or more pieces of hardware that worked before not work afterward? How much time did you spend on forums hunting for "fixes"? If you handed these clueless relatives their PC with a blank HDD and Ubuntu, what are the odds they will have a COMPLETELY working system when they are done?

You see it is quite easy to have clueless relatives on Linux...if you are willing to be unpaid tech support for life. MY time costs $50 an hour, and I don't do freebies, which means just TWO hours of hunting forums or dealing with CLI hoops costs me MORE than a copy of windows Home. A wise man here on /. once said "Linux is free if your time is worthless" and no truer words have ever been spoken. Until the day comes that I can hand a customer a working Linux box and have at LEAST a 90% confidence that when the 6 month upgrade cycle comes around they won't be stuck with a paperweight then it is worthless to me and most retailers.

BTW, what do you think of the fact that Dell has to disable updating and Canonical repos from ALL their Ubuntu offerings, because even with the tiny subset of machines Dell offers Canonical can't even be bothered with basic QA to ensure they don't break on update? I mean if Dell, a billion dollar company with a one on one relationship with Canonical, can't even get basic QA support or allow their machines to update without it falling like a house of cards, what chance do the rest of us have...hmmm?

Uuuhhhh....Anonymous dude? XP Pro X64 is $139 and you can use ALL the RAM you could ever want (I am currently running 8Gb on the CPU and 1Gb on the GPU) and I haven't had any trouble running anything on it except for REALLY old, like Win95 era 16 bit crap on it. If your hardware doesn't have 64 bit drivers you can pick up XP Pro 32 for $134 or XP Home for $89.

So please, don't punish yourself with Vista. I'm sure whatever you did in this life or the last you are REALLY sorry for and don't deserve the "wow, this makes WinME look good!" suffering that is Vista. Just forgive yourself and get a copy of XP. Your sanity and your hairline will thank you for it. Oh, and if you have one of those POS PCs/laptops where they give you ONLY Vista drivers? Just use SIW to find out who made the actual hardware (I'm sure it uses bog standard parts like Realtek and Broadcom) and then hit up driverguide.

Remember, the Internet is your friend, so use it wisely. I know this works because I have exorcised the demon Vista off of many a Dell and HP including laptops and while the drivers may end up a mix of OEMs, they all actually run XP now and run quite nicely, if I do say so myself. So don't suffer the hell that is Vista, be kind to yourself and go back to the goodness that is XP. And if your machine has X64 drivers you can just bypass Win7 while you are at it, as it will be quite awhile before XP reaches EOL, and I seriously doubt anyone will be using 128Gb of RAM by 2014, at least not on anything but a major server. So release your anger grasshopper, and let go of the evil OS. Life is too short to risk a coronary dealing with the soul sucking evilness that is Vista.

Well as a PC repair guy I can give you a trick if you haven't thought of it already-avoid the manufacturers website. The manufacturer usually supports a grand total of ONE OS and that is it. But luckily unless you got something really funky the chips are commodity hardware and SOMEBODY has used that chip with an XP X64 build. So lets say you got a Dell with an ATI GPU, a Broadcom wifi, and the AC-97 sound. Just use SIW to get a nice HTML printout of the particular hardware you are looking at and then Google them chip by chip. Sometimes you may have to extract the .exe manually then rub Windows nose in it, but you'd be surprised how many times I have ended up with a "Hackentop" with ASUS and Dell and HP drivers because somebody got burnt with a Vista laptop and paid me to make it go away for XP.

And I have to agree with the "if it ain't broke" sentiment. I have actually had customers tell me "If you can't get XP running on it just give me what you can for the parts and junk the thing. Then find out how much you can get me something similar with XP". That is how much they HATE Vista. And as much as I'm happy to stick with XP X64 with XP32 for my family if Bill came back and fired that damned monkey I'd be happy to buy a copy of Win7 for every member of my family just to get Bill to stay. Ballmer is just like that Pepsi guy that Apple had, going from one crappy idea to the next, he just has more money to blow than Pepsi guy did.

Bill Gates may have been a bastard, but he was a bastard that could get a good business OS out the door. Same as Jobs may be a bastard, but even his enemies admit that the man has style and knows his market. With Ballmer I get the feeling that this conversation goes on with Ballmer at least once a week-/Ballmer/ "And with this release I PROMISE that we will be as cool and hip and happening as Apple! We really, really will! Yes we will! WHY IS EVERYONE LAUGHING AT ME!!!". If I didn't have to deal with the customer hatred of Vista at least once a week I'd think it was funny. After seeing screenshots of Win7 I think it is just sad. pretty much everyone I showed it to said "But I don't want an Apple!". I have never seen a CEO piss money down the drain like Ballmer when he actually has a winning product in XP. All he would have to do is release XP32/64 with a new theme as "XP Reloaded" and they would be lined up around the block to buy it. I would kill to have customers like that.

Download and run SIW which will give you the hardware ID. I have run into this EXACT same problem a million times at the shop so I'll walk you through it,okay? You see,nearly all laptops are running sound chips based on either the Sigmatel or Realtek sound chips. Now the generic Sigmatel and Realtek sound chips will work just fine,they just don't give them to you because it is cheaper for them to only support one OS.

Now the special function buttons are major PITA,but I CAN give you a way to get the roughly same functionality using different keys. Download Keydemon which will allow you to remap the F6-F12 keys to any function you want. You can then use these to bypass the funky keys. I hope this helps,just remember that it is possible,as I have done it more times than I can count. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Actually most computers are made with bog standard parts,the PC manufacturer simply doesn't package them for one OS or another because they don't want to support multiple Operating Systems for a piece of hardware. Simply use this tool to find out what the hardware ID is for the "no driver" piece and then download the driver from another source. If you would like an example,working repair shop I have found many laptops with "no driver" for sound,yet when I look at the hardware ID I find that it is almost always based on either the Realtek AC'97 or the Sigmatek sound chip. Then I simply take a Realtek or Sigmatek driver for XP from another site and voila! The "no driver" hardware magically works.

It is extremely rare to find anything truly proprietary anymore,they simply don't bother to package the drivers on the website. That way when you go around it they can ignore you if you need support. But I've been doing this for more years than I care to admit and so far,knock on wood,I haven't found a machine with hardware I couldn't find a driver for. Now getting a Compaq Mobo with all their proprietary hardware connectors into a new case is another story,but laptops are usually pretty easy once you have the hardware ID.

So if I was in your position I would make a disk image using Acronis(in case you need to send it back for warranty repairs or if you decide you want to go back to Vista at a later date) then download drivers matching the hardware IDs of your "unsupported" hardware. Usually I find a generic driver or barring that one from Acer or HP for similar hardware works best. Simply use the ISO builder to incorporate your drivers and make an unattended. Since you have the disk image you don't have to worry about anything going wrong and leaving you stranded,and if you guess wrong the first time as far as drivers go you can simply try again with another blank CD. Or you can add several drivers onto a folder on the CD and install them after OS installation,your call. But I have done it enough times to know that it works. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

"It seems to me that if this program can do that, then it can't be hard for a more nefarious program on my computer to do the same."

Exactly. For example, something like System Info for Windows EP

The thing that scared me away from the password manager in Firefox was a program called System Info for Windows. It lists all sorts of things about your computer--click on "Secrets." It searches for passwords in several programs--I have a few passwords saved in FF and the vast majority in Opera. I saw both programs mentioned in its analysis (meaning it searched both FF and Opera for saved passwords). It listed every saved FF password but no Opera passwords.

It seems to me that if this program can do that, then it can't be hard for a more nefarious program on my computer to do the same.

Try SIW http://www.gtopala.com/ - it gives you all the keys you might want from a Windows system- and any other info you might want from the machine/software too.
It can run from am memory stick if you want it to, so it cannot be deleted in a scan.

./nalle.