To get some extra pocket money to spend in the everyday maintenance of my systems, I also ended up working on maintenance of Windows computers on a daily basis; it’s not extraordinarily bad, and it usually doesn’t take me more than a day for a single computer even if it’s the first time I see it (once I’ve seen it once, I already know what to expect).
Unfortunately, it’s not always feasible to convert people to Linux yet; although I think I might start soon enough at least with a few people whose only use of a computer is to “browse websites, send email, watch a movie from time to time”. To make the task easier I obviously set up systems with Firefox and Thunderbird, VLC and OpenOffice, so that at least some programs can be found on the ”new“ systems when they migrate.
Unfortunately, it seems like Windows, especially Windows XP, a lot of my customers have OEM licenses for, has become a driver hell just like it was in the old days. And vendors don’t seem to make that much easier. Most vendors providing complete systems tend not to care about their users enough to provide downloads for the drivers (they just tell you to use their recovery partition; guess what? that stuff often doesn’t work extremely well, if at all, and in one instance it was even mounted as a drive on the normal OS… which meant it was infected too!), and the components’ manufacturer have websites that calling complex would be euphemistic:
- ATI/AMD website is a mess to navigate; while they do (or did) chipsets too, you cannot really find a “chipset drivers” section; if you have an older version of a motherboard that is supported by legacy drivers you’ve got to navigate at least four pages before you can find out!
- Asus website is a mess of javascript; whenever you ask to download something you have to tell them the operating system you’re looking for… – even for BIOS updates – the window is centered on the screen and does not work on cellphones, and of course once I could have used a cellphone just fine if it wasn’t for that (given that Asus boards usually can update the bios through USB sticks); no matter that half the time, whatever operating system you select, the same stuff is given you;
- Intel website is also a labyrinth; to download some driver you got to search for the right class of software, then decide you got one in particular, and it often proposes you two options, then you have to agree to the license and again click download… that does not download the thing but rather redirects you to a page that calls a javascript to download the file; such javascript can sometimes not work at all, so they provide you with the usual ”if the file does not download, click here“; but rather than being a direct link, it’s also a javascript function; checking the function, it lists a clear bouncer link (which you could download with wget, too!), but with a little more presence of mind, you can notice that the link is _provided as a GET-dparameter to the (dynamic, at this point) page on Intel’s server; much easier to copy that out and drop the rest I’d say;
- Realtek’s website sometimes does not work properly; on the other hand they give you direct FTP links so once you know the FTP server you can find the drivers just fine avoiding the website; would have been nicer to split it down for driver type so that the listing wouldn’t take a few minutes, but I have to say is the system that works better; even if FTP does make me feel like we’re back in the early ‘90s;
- almost all download sites tend to have pretty slow connections, or capped connections; I can understand Asus, Gigabyte and Realtek that have their main server in Taiwan or so it would seem, but what about Intel? Luckily at least ATI and nVidia (that have the biggest driver packs) have very fast servers.
Then there are other problems like trying to understand that ”ATI Technologies, Inc. SBx00 Azalia” is actually the name reported by lspci for a Realtek Azalia coded that needs the HDA drivers from Realtek; or trying to guess the driver version, or the driver’s name, from the downloaded files, that often enough don’t have any kind of naming or versioning scheme. Again ATI (for quite a long time) and nVidia (recently) solved this in a pretty nice way: thei use their logo for the install executable; this does not make it very manageable under Linux though, given that nautilus doesn’t show (yet) the PE icon (maybe I can modify it to load the PE file, and extract the icon?).
Let’s just hope that Microsoft’s moves with Vista and Windows 7 will be a trampoline for Linux for the masses; I sincerely count more on Microsoft’s changes than Google OS as I’ve noted since Vista already gave us something useful for Linux.