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TheMono
May 24th, 2007, 08:41 AM
I just converted a friend's flatmate to Ubuntu.

We're all aware the linux does not have the best track record with wireless, right? Well his new Vista laptop would not wirelessly connect to his router, no matter what he did. He rang Acer, who said it is a known issue with his setup, and there is no fix yet.

I took a look at it and said, Here, boot to this live CD so we can see if it will work with this.

Boots to Ubuntu. Connects to router immediately.

He has now switched to using Ubuntu, because that is the only way he can get decent hardware support!

stueyboy
May 24th, 2007, 09:36 AM
Another convert then. I am going to change over our home laptop to Ubuntu before XP stops being supported by MS as it is a perfectly decent machine but won't run Vista and the cost of upgrade just makes me cringe.

reclusivemonkey
May 24th, 2007, 12:12 PM
He's not alone. I have had this many times;


I bought a cheapo analogue TV card from PC World bargain bin. It was a Packard Bell I believe, and boldly emblazoned on the box was "Works with Windows XP". It completely refused to work with XP, and all the googling I did came up with "Take it back to the store and get a Hauppage". Popped it in my Linux box, it worked first time, flawlessly.

I have a Creative Soundblaster Live 5.1 card, one that must be in millions of PCs. Again, the box proudly claims "Works with Windows XP". The drivers on the disk don't work. The drivers on creative's website don't work. The majority of drivers on driverguide.com don't work; I did eventually manage to find one that worked, but it won't give me more than two speakers. It works in Linux, out of the box, flawlessly.

I have a Broadcom Wireless PCI network card. Hearing wireless was tricky in Linux, I tried it in a friend's XP machine I was fixing at the time. No dice. I just could not get any signal at all, and Windows was completely unhelpful, with no options to explore to try and find out what was going on. Stuck it in a Linux machine, and followed the simple instructions on the net, via the CLI. It worked fist time, no problems, and having gone through the stages one by one in the CLI, I felt very comfortable knowing what was going on at each stage, and occasionally when I do have problems I can quickly diagnose where the issue is.


I know my experiences may not relate to an "end user", but to someone who builds their own machines and knows their way around an Operating System, Linux is FAR easier to deal with than XP for me.