Why Installing Windows Sucks

I'm finally finishing up the repair of my broken Windows 2000 / gaming box. All I had for legal disks was XP Pro, so that's running on the box now.

I work with computers all day long, all week long, and usually for fun. So why does it take me ~10 hours to install Windows on a fairly standard PC and still not have it working completely? Yes, it takes me days when I install gentoo on my linux boxes, but that's because I'm COMPILING every last little bit of code *and* I have to download every single bit and byte of code.

All of this wouldn't have happened if there was a way to fix the "old" box short of actually reformatting the hard drive. But, I tried everything and all that did was cause it to blue screen faster. So, I finally had finished copying all the old data on my windows drives onto my linux server. I plugged the hard drives back in and went to boot up the box. No BIOS. How the hell did I manage to screw up the BIOS? So, I went to the Internet and it turns out that when I plugged the hard drives back in, I must have messed something up. I check all the parameters and yup, there's a jumper missing. So I put the jumper on.

Reboot.

and BSOD and Reboot... and BSOD and Reboot.... ad nauseum.

Why isn't the machine picking up that I have a CD-ROM to boot from and why am I still not getting the BIOS info? Apparently, when I took out the old hard drives, I had unplugged the CD-ROM drive. Whee. Plug in the CD-ROM. Reboot. Yay. There's a BIOS. And I can now tell it to boot from CD-ROM.

Reboot. Format C: drive (the one which was BSOD otherwise). Start installation of XP. Its happily copying files, so I leave it alone and go mess around on the computer in the other room. Windows had told me it would be ~40 minutes total install time.

Come back 30 minutes later and its still at 40 minutes. There was a little prompt I needed to fill in. Fill in the prompts. Wait a little bit. No more prompts? Ok, back to the other machine. Come back 30 minutes later again, and there's a prompt.

Why can't it just ask for all the prompt stuff at once so that I can go on and do something else while its copying? I shouldn't have to babysit an install like that.

So, I suck it up and babysit the install. The rest of it goes ok. Find the CD of my video card, install that. Properties seem to work ok. Go to windows update - 3 installs. (that's it???) Install those. Reboot. Install Firefox. Find CD for sound card. Install sound card. Oops.... that didn't work so well. After letting it sit, apparently hung, for 2.5 hours while I was trying to set up some other non-standard stuff, I finally killed it. Tomorrow I will try to install from a downloaded web driver instead. I think there was a conflict. However, this means I have no sound. Which isn't particularly good for a gaming box.

Just because I didn't trust the original Windows Update, I go back and click on custom instead of express. 27 updates. That sounds *closer* to the right number, but still a little bit on the low side. Install them. Reboot.

BTW - I found the client which will allow me to use NFS mounts inside windows. I'm sick of the annoying configuration of samba shares, and its much harder to make a samba share on linux than it is to make an NFS share. However, its a 222 MB download, so its taking a while. I also installed Zone Alarm for my firewall and AVG for my virus protection. Commercial ware for free for home users. Yay.

My next task, after getting the sound working, is to figure out why my mouse is squeaking. Only real mice should squeak. This is just annoying.

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Oh yeah, and all invitations for whom I have addresses are compiled, but my father wants me to change the directions card. Whee. Is "just past" a half mile? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on your point of view. And is it worth the time and money it will take to fix that? *sigh*