only OS ive used that i couldnt install...

[briancurtin]

windows

my computer came with XP media center edition, because it had a TV tuner and all of that jazz. it was nice, worked alright until one day and i decided it was time to get out of XP-town. i gave it one shot to reinstall and see how things go, but yeah that worked out great...the install took forever and asked me for my SP2 disc. yeah, i just have SP2 discs laying around, so i cancelled out of that, went on with the install and it drops me into XP with the classic theme. not that i care too much, but i couldnt even make it look like that blue theme, wasnt a possibility, but oh well no big deal. i pop my drivers CDs in, install everything, no luck, still stuck in like a 640x480 resolution or something on my 17" widescreen laptop. thats not XPs fault, drivers disc fault, but ill move on. so its time to hit Internet Explorer and grab Firefox...but yeah thats not possible - Internet Explorer is not installed and cannot be found. i found this impossible, but it was right before my eyes that it wasnt even installed or couldnt be found on any install discs. thats a big problem, but then i grab firefox off another computer and install it from my USB drive so now i can get on the net...or so i thought. no networking applications are installed. the control panel doesnt even contain the normal thing to setup networking options and such. cant ping google in cmd, cant do anything. basically it was a complete waste of my time. i went out and bought SuSE 9.3 at the time, installed it in 30 minutes and had it all going.

that was 8 months ago. in the meantime i have flawlessly installed SuSE, ubuntu, fedora core 4, centOS 4.x, and most recently Arch. i just happened to reinstall Arch earlier today and had a fully running KDE system in about 35 minutes, plus a while to get it all to my liking. ive never had a problem installing a linux system. ive jumped through some hoops like we all have, but never had problems installing except for windows.

it just so happened that yesterday a friend wanted me to help install windows on his box. he wanted to try out linux and i got him running on SuSE about 4 months ago. he liked it, had no major problems with it, but he just wanted to move back to windows because when we graduate i wont be there to help him fix it if things go wrong (and hes not too technical). so i give him my OEM XP media center discs, they are the real deal. cant install them at all, after hours of being stuck in an endless cycle. so we try a pirated disc that he has, no luck there either. swap out the hard drive with another one since nothing at all would work, and we try the OEM disc i gave him, and of course it was just a replay of what happened to me above where it was a worthless install. so he grabs the pirated copy, installs it perfectly, and is now underway back in windows.

isnt it great how we can install a fully running linux system in like a half hour or so (depending on my connection speed), yet with the most popular operating system, with official CDs, that it gets me absolutely nowhere?

[FoxLogic]

Lmao... I've been down this road.

[briancurtin]

im glad i cant even install it on my own computer, no need for it. this is one of the things i can thank microsoft for.

[Derek Djons]

Usually there's an normal explenation for this. You also didn't mentioned which specific problems you encountered during the installation on your friends PC. Nothing doesn't works just like that without error or some kind of malfunction.

In your case it's logical that the Windows MCE installation was totally mashed up. When you skip the second disc it's even not worth it to continue. A lot of app's and other important modules aren't being installed then. Windows MCE always consists out of two discs or one DVD. So... maybe you don't have the second disc, or the PC manufacturer forgot to add the second disc?

But I do agree with you on how easy and sweet installing Linux on a random computers. It's like sweet candy which ends too soon :P

[briancurtin]

there were no errors, specific problems, or malfunctions on my computer or his computer at any point. i didnt skip the second disc of the install, i skipped putting SP2 on during the install but put it on after the install was finished. that should not cause any problems at all, as it is not necessary to install it with the base system. i read a little something about it on a few message boards that came up in a google search, but i found a lot more info on the seemingly infinite loop that we were getting. setup the partitions, format NTFS, copy the files, the system restarts to install it, and you are back to setting up partitions, formatting NTFS, and copying the files again, over and over and over again. its quite odd, but magically it worked out in the end.

[moopet]

In your case it's logical that the Windows MCE installation was totally mashed up. When you skip the second disc it's even not worth it to continue. A lot of app's and other important modules aren't being installed then. Windows MCE always consists out of two discs or one DVD. So... maybe you don't have the second disc, or the PC manufacturer forgot to add the second disc?

MCE is a hacked version of normal XP, which shows up during the install of most MCE versions; when it wants disc 1 of MCE, it asks for the XP SP2 disc. In much the same way as when MS buy out a company and rebrand their product they often don't bother to test it very well (eg MS antispyware reports itself as GIANT antispyware for about 50% of the registry entries)

It's a known issue. Like how MCE doesn't play DVDs out the box, due to licensing agreements in the same way linux doesn't play a lot of things without non-free codecs. Difference is, MS have the money to pay for it, they just don't :)

MCE installs are a pain in the ****. Always. I've done a lot.

[Stormy Eyes]

isnt it great how we can install a fully running linux system in like a half hour or so (depending on my connection speed), yet with the most popular operating system, with official CDs, that it gets me absolutely nowhere?

I've had this problem too. Installing Windows can be a real pain in the ****. Linux, on the other hand: given the right distro, a cat could install it.

[bjweeks]

This is just a fanboy post I've installed windows countless times never had an error but many linux installs have failed. So does that make linux sucks? um no. You did something wrong or have bad install media(OEM count) so how about you try and fix the problem.

All the ubuntu owns windows are just as bad as the windows owns linux.

[xequence]

Windows MCE always consists out of two discs or one DVD.

Three discs I believe.

Windows has always installed just as good as linux for me. Just a horrible partitioner.

[briancurtin]

This is just a fanboy post I've installed windows countless times never had an error but many linux installs have failed. So does that make linux sucks? um no. You did something wrong or have bad install media(OEM count) so how about you try and fix the problem.

All the ubuntu owns windows are just as bad as the windows owns linux.
your post is a fanboy post too then if we are going by your logic, fanboy. i was telling a story because we hear countless people talking about how linux doesnt install, and the same is true for windows. you are incorrect that i did something wrong, and i will not try to fix a problem. it is a documented problem, and being that i do not use nor care about windows, im perfectly happy with my friend installing his pirated version of regular XP and having it work. please point to me where i said windows sucks at any point in my post, i would like to see that. i never said ubuntu owns windows either, i dont even use ubuntu and probably will never use it again.

thanks for trying though

[xequence]

you are incorrect that i did something wrong

You said you have the SP2 discs laying around but you canceled out of it. Seems to me like you did something wrong.

the install took forever and asked me for my SP2 disc. yeah, i just have SP2 discs laying around, so i cancelled out of that, went on with the install and it drops me into XP with the classic theme.

[majikstreet]

You said you have the SP2 discs laying around but you canceled out of it. Seems to me like you did something wrong.
Guess you've never heard of sarcasm.

[xequence]

Guess you've never heard of sarcasm.


I dont see how someone can be sarcastic about cancelling out of an install for a part of an OS.

Now what you said was sarcastic.

[Vorian]

Usually there's an normal explenation for this.

error: carbon based

[arctic]

I had something similar happening once. I had bought a new computer, without a pre-installed OS. I still had WinME and tried to install it. The system rebooted before anything started (The same media worked on my older PC). Checked the hardware, everything seemed to be okay.

I bought WinXP. It did start the PC up again but then went into an infinite loop and it never installed. I verified that the CDs are okay. Still no go. Went to the manufacturer, he tried his best, still no go. Hardware was 100% okay, no faulty RAM, no cable probs. Then we tried a Knoppix CD I had just bought with a magazine and violà, everything worked. That was the first of my PCs that never saw Windows again.

Now, I have several systems, all using different Linux distros. :)

[briancurtin]

I dont see how someone can be sarcastic about cancelling out of an install for a part of an OS.

Now what you said was sarcastic.
i was being sarcastic. how would i just happen to have an SP2 disc? when you buy the windows media center, it does not come with an SP2 disc. it comes with two install discs (i even tried disc 2 when it asked for SP2 just for fun, no luck). i hit cancel and it let me go on. SP2 is SP2...it is not the disc that carries IE on it. have i not read in several places that IE is more than a browser, and that several integral parts of the operating system need IE? i may be wrong, but you do not need to have SP2 to have internet explorer.

[xequence]

i was being sarcastic. how would i just happen to have an SP2 disc? when you buy the windows media center, it does not come with an SP2 disc. it comes with two install discs (i even tried disc 2 when it asked for SP2 just for fun, no luck). i hit cancel and it let me go on. SP2 is SP2...it is not the disc that carries IE on it. have i not read in several places that IE is more than a browser, and that several integral parts of the operating system need IE? i may be wrong, but you do not need to have SP2 to have internet explorer.

Oh. You were being sarcastic about the part about having SP2 cds... Didnt realise that =P

[super]

trust me, the only real way to re-install windows quickly is with a ghost cd. otherwise you end up spending freakin' hours at at it.

btw does anyone know if vista is gonna use a more modular filesystem layout? will you be able to use different partitionsfor different users like in *nix?

cause that is another way to help save on the time it takes to do a re-install

[majikstreet]

Oh. You were being sarcastic about the part about having SP2 cds... Didnt realise that =P
lol

[Vorian]

Oh. You were being sarcastic about the part about having SP2 cds... Didnt realise that
BC's too serious to be sarcastic.

[IYY]

I had similar experiences with my laptop. It's an ancient 333 MHz Celeron that seemed to reject any Windows installed on it (except for NT, for which it was designed, and even that was buggy). FreeBSD installed, but took a couple of weeks of tinkering to get working just right. A few months ago I installed Ubuntu on it and everything worked 100% out of the box.

[aysiu]

trust me, the only real way to re-install windows quickly is with a ghost cd. otherwise you end up spending freakin' hours at at it. Yes, my eMachines computer came with a ghost CD (actually three CDs), and it was a wonderfully easy way to reinstall Windows. My old Dell laptop also came with three CDs--Windows XP, InterVideo WinDVD, and Drivers & Utilities. Without those second two CDs, reinstalling was a pain!

[Bandit]

I have isntalling issues of WinXP on my wifes system also.
Everytime I let it install SP2 the sound quits or it starts locking up.
I have never had any issues with Ubuntu or Kubuntu working perfectly out of the box on it.
I even tried WinXP Pro 64bit on my system the other day ( they have 6 month trial period and I wanted to dual boot for games.) But when I went to install the video drivers from ATI's website so I could have good 3D it crashed WinXP horibly...
The screen went all haywire and looked like old ASCI graphics all over the screen. Needless to say Windows doesnt have a xorg.conf files for me to correct the issue.
So after 20 minutes of XP 64bit I was running back to Ubuntu for safety..

Windows is such garbage, anyone who disagrees is in a dreamworld of their own..

Cheers,
Joey

[mstlyevil]

I don't believe XP is garbage but I built my first computer a few years ago. It was a Athlon XP 2500 with a MSI Nforce2 mobo, generic RAM, Maxtor hard drive and a Sapphire Radeon 9600. All the parts were mainstream but the RAM. I went to install a brand new copy of Windows XP Pro SP1 and before the CD finished loading I would get a BSOD. I tried several times and the same thing would happen over and over. A friend of mine had a old copy of Windows 98 so we installed it and there were no errors. After that just for the heck of it we tried reinstalling XP and this time it installed correctly without any errors whatsoever. To this day I still do not understand why XP would not install on a new computer without installing Win 98 first.

[Bandit]

I had a AMD K6-233 that would not install Win98 for anything. Much like you I had to install Win 95 first then use the upgrade.

[aysiu]

Windows is such garbage, anyone who disagrees is in a dreamworld of their own.. Huh? I must be in a dreamworld of my own. I've had very few problems with Windows XP. It's a stable OS. I don't see much wrong with it.

The only reason it's difficult to install is that it's an operating system. Any operating system can be difficult to install if it doesn't recognize everything right away.

For Windows, you have to track down drivers.
For Linux, you have to edit a config file or two.

[mstlyevil]

I had a AMD K6-233 that would not install Win98 for anything. Much like you I had to install Win 95 first then use the upgrade.

The funniest thing was I did a fresh install of XP over 98 and did not upgrade. There might have been something corrupted on the hard drive that 98 somehow fixed.

[Bandit]

Huh? I must be in a dreamworld of my own. I've had very few problems with Windows XP. It's a stable OS. I don't see much wrong with it.

The only reason it's difficult to install is that it's an operating system. Any operating system can be difficult to install if it doesn't recognize everything right away.

For Windows, you have to track down drivers.
For Linux, you have to edit a config file or two.
Windows has been overly plagued with problems since the first 16bit release.
Some versions have been better then others. I personally think Win2k was the best release ever.
I have owned every version of windows since 3.1. And except Win2k I have hated them all. Even on all these PCs listed below.

AMD 386DX
AMD 486DX2-66
AMD 486DX4-100
AMD K6-233
AMD K6-300
AMD K62-400
AMD K7-500
AMD Athlon 2400+
AMD Athlon64 3000+

And I have used quality parts in each system. Nothing generic ever.
Just realized I have buit for myself alone alot of computers.
Before those I had two Tandys that never had issues. I never had Tandy Deskmate crash.. No blue screen, No lockups, no problems. period...
And Linux has worked on each one perfectly.

[aysiu]

To each her own.

I hated Windows 2000.

As far as I can tell (from my own personal needs as an end-user) Windows XP is just 2000 but with these differences:

If I'm using MSPAINT to paste in a screenshot (which I do quite often at work), XP automatically enlarges the image size to match the size of the screenshot. 2000 asks for confirmation each time. XP also allows you to save as .jpg. 2000 has only .bmp and .gif.

XP has both a classic and new style for the Start Menu. I happen to like the new style, where it lists your most recently-used applications for easy access.

Luna isn't the best theme in the world, but it is nicer than the classic Windows theme (the one 2000 still uses), as is the new Silver XP theme.

I can't think of what the other things are off the top of my head, but I was very grateful when our office switched from 2000 to XP finally.