Out the Window (WSJ)

Posted May 17, 2006 4:39 UTC (Wed) by dirtyepic (guest, #30178)
In reply to: Out the Window (WSJ) by zgoda
Parent article: Out the Window (WSJ)

Well, it also takes me more than 4 hours to install Windows XP SP2 on my desktop and get it to a point where it's actually usable for me. This includes the install, booting, configuring the network options to the bare minimum needed to "safely" connect to the internet with IE, downloading Firefox and Sygate, installing Sygate, rebooting, configuring Sygate, configuring Firefox, downloading the many many Microsoft Updates available (rebooting multiple times at points in between), downloading and installing drivers for all my hardware (probably a reboot in here too), going through the control panel modules to change the defaults to sane / preferential settings (rebooting to change to a static swap size), downloading and installing various applications and utilities that aren't available out of the box (AV, ad-ware manager, a decent video player (+ codecs), a decent music player, a utility suite to clean up after Windows' crap, a pdf reader, a cd burning app, etc.) and so on and so on.

This is just to get to a point where i can use the computer without wanting to throw it out the window. I'm not counting the hours I'll spend tweaking settings, playing in the registry, and just generally getting things to work "right".

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you don't have to put in a similar effort to get things working in Linux. I know for a fact you do (and in the case of my Gentoo systems add another a month or so ;P). But you can't say that Windows is so much better.