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You aren't the only person who is annoyed/irked by this. I am as well, though I do not run W8 or W10 on any system I own, but I have tried them both on VMs. I about lost my shit when the installer near the end said "Hi" with nothing else on the screen. This is just another example of Microsoft not understanding the overall purpose of its OS -- to be a tool that lets people get things done, not to try and act like something out of Her (which was a wonderful film, BTW, but the whole premise there concerned me for the same reasons).

Maybe it should say "Good-bye" when shutting down. Or better yet, say none of this bullshit at all, like in the days of Windows XP and earlier. There were legitimate and well-thought-out reasons behind many of the UI aspects and the presentation of information in XP, many of which were deprecated or tossed with W7, and *definitely* thrown out by the time you got to W8. I honestly wonder if the folks who did most of XP are still at Microsoft in the same roles they were then (doubtful -- they might be managers by now), because if not, it wouldn't surprise me.

It's like the slogan has become: Windows 8 (or Windows 10): Written for Idiots by Idiots.

This is worse than Bill Gates inventing the personal computer, when all he did was steal CP/M. Let's do a little better at getting history correct.

No offense, but Bill Gates did not steal CP/M. He had the smarts and vision to purchase a product called 86-DOS when other people thought that home computers would be nothing but toys.

Now I say this as someone who is typically critical of shear number of flaws in Windows and the BILLIONS of dollars spent to develop that ship-wreck. You might not like his products, but you can't argue with his early business savvy.

I wonder if they will let you buy the windows 7 upgrade for xp though?

From what I've seen over the years, Microsoft generally allows "upgrade" versions to work on at least the two previous versions. Upgrade versions of Vista work on Windows XP and Windows 2000. Upgrade versions of XP work on Windows 2000, NT 4, ME, and 98. Upgrade versions of Office 2007 work on Office 2000, XP, and 2003.

Technically, it's the Windows Classic style.

5 seconds of googling turned up:

http://www.motherboard.windowsreinstall.com/winxp.htm

Which has multiple solutions for an in-place upgrade if windows can't do it alone on reboot.

Windows is bad and all, but the registry is one of the few pieces of Windows that just works as intended. Its a data repository. How applications use that repository is their own business.

Most hardware vendors are now making linux-compatible drivers. All the graphics heavyweights are (granted, ATI's aren't exactly that fantastic, but at least they're providing them). NDISwrapper works now with just about all major wireless cards. Bluetooth, sound drivers, USB block devices - check check and check. Apple's iPods don't have anything built by the vendors yet but the open-source alternatives seem to have ironed out most of the kinks.

Vista on the other hand is still playing catchup. And by the time Gutsy Gibson comes out, you think they'll have those problems licked? Christ, they're talking Service Pack now... remember what happened last time Microsoft tried to do one of those? Anybody with SP2 was being advised by just about every support department (I know because I was working with MSN support at the time) to downgrade back to SP1. For over a year after SP2 was released. A YEAR! I'll put money that Gutsy will have more hardware natively supported quicker than Vista. And its final release is still two months away!

I dunno. I think now that Dell and other major OEMs are starting to jump on the linux bandwagon, the commercial driver support is sure to follow, if it hasn't already (Big Blue, Novell, SGI, just to name a few).

And user interaction increasing between Linux and Windows? I dunno about you, but I've found the Ubuntu install process to be more intuitive and easier to deal with than Vista's billion-screen install. Not to mention you can browse the internet, chat on messenger, listen to music, etc. WHILE THE OS IS INSTALLING. The default settings are made so the transition from Windows is fairly easy.

Yeah, there's still a few kinks. But whereas Linux was for tinkerers and hobbyists in the late 90s, and around when RH8 came out it became simple for the experienced computer user, now I'd be willing to throw linux in for any intermediate computer user. That is to say, not ready for Grandma yet but a hell of a lot closer than it ever has been.

I've been Ubuntu-cheerleading a lot here, but it's nice to see that over the last 5 years of linux (the time I've been a user of it) it's improved tremendously in the user-interface department. And it's only going up from here. And a lot of that has to do with some of the more recent distros, namely Knoppix and Ubuntu.

He's right, it's an issue with the IDE Drivers. Before you swap motherboards on a Win2k+ install make sure that the IDE driver in device manager is set to generic. Otherwise you'll get that dreaded STOP Error.

Here's a good link for it:

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/install/other/moth erboard/problems.htm

My Freespire installation seemed to go smoothly until I was presented with a login and password scenario. I thought maybe I had downloaded the wrong thing. As determined as I was, I went online to checkout what to do, and was taught I was supposed to enter "root" and login and something else as password (don't remember anymore). To be honest, I don't remember what happened after that, but it was enough to make me give up.

Have you ever installed windows?

This is not an issue with linux being too hard. This is an issue with you not understanding how to install an operating system. Most(if not all) linux distro's ask for a root password. Lets see what windows does.

You can change motherboards in Windows without having to reinstall. You just have to do a repair install part of the way and it should be happy (should being the operative term).

I couldnt get the 2k machine to boot by using the cd or any form of rescue disk

So, uh... how did you reinstall 2k then?

Not that a repair install could've helped you at that point. Once you booted the HD with the new MB you were pretty well screwed.

More info on how to accomplish a MB swap w/o a full reinstall is available here and here.

Yes, Linux does it better. I'm not disputing that. But changing out a MB doesn't necessarily mean you must reinstall (it used to though).

Well, you just got lucky. There are some motherboard changes that might work (similar chipsets?), but others that won't. It has to do with HAL customization. They might've changed things in WinXP, but with Win2k this is a common issue.

When I switched from an AMD K6-2 based motherboard to a Athlon 1.4GHz based motherboard, I ran into this issue. The only solution was to reinstall and then restore a backup. This is also what Microsoft recommends, even for WinXP. Some people have said that if you do a motherboard swap (without the reinstall) and even if it works fine, Win2k may not make use of your hardware correctly (even though you don't notice, for example it could make a difference in performance).

Having said all this, I realized I haven't really done much research into doing motherboard swaps on Linux. I just assumed everything was fine since I can take a hard drive with Linux on it and put it in any of my PCs, and just assumed everything was working fine (I suppose it depends on your kernel and what it was compiled with). But I know at least that it boots up and runs fine!

Three-thirty AM
I - tears! - grok. Now, reimage,
(7th time) -- ditch my drive.

oh, wait, did you mean the Linux kernel?