I have had the same experience with doing clean installs of Windows 98 and XP. It was even worse when I on one PC I had to install 95 before I could install 98 (because a driver was for 95).
I am currently living in Japan. About a year ago I bought a used laptop that had no OS on it for secondary use. I tried Slackware and Mandriva on it, but neither of them could find the wireless, much less the ethernet, cards. I also tried XP with the same luck. Finally I installed my first run of Ubuntu, and Everything worked on the first try. The only hang was that compiz (damn ATI drivers) and the memory card reader didn't work.
When my primary laptop's screen burnt out on me (an XP install), my Ubuntu install was a life saver.
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I have had the same experience with doing clean installs of Windows 98 and XP. It was even worse when I on one PC I had to install 95 before I could install 98 (because a driver was for 95).
I am currently living in Japan. About a year ago I bought a used laptop that had no OS on it for secondary use. I tried Slackware and Mandriva on it, but neither of them could find the wireless, much less the ethernet, cards. I also tried XP with the same luck. Finally I installed my first run of Ubuntu, and Everything worked on the first try. The only hang was that compiz (damn ATI drivers) and the memory card reader didn't work.
When my primary laptop's screen burnt out on me (an XP install), my Ubuntu install was a life saver.