Windows 7, XP, and Fedora

Keith Austin, May 31, 2009



Desktop OS

Windows 7, XP, and Fedora Linux

I have done a bit of installing and re-installing the Microsoft Operating System and its base applications.

The rule has been that you usually needed to re-install Windows about once a year, virus or not, post DOS.

Does anyone remember Windows 286? I do, I remember the box actually but not the software. Windows 95, NT, 98, 98-SE, Me, and XP always would get junked up and the best correction was to erase your hard disk and start over. Lately, many users don't get a year before a virus or some self-inflicted disaster (Bruce) necessitates a rebuild. This is one of the things I always loved about Linux, once you got it working it would work the same (correctly) until you had a hardware failure.

Linux used to be easy to install and get up and running quickly. Not so anymore, since my last few encounters with Fedora anyway. My last few installs have been disappointing to say the least. Not saying the least, I agree with a growing number of others that the Linux distros are not getting better but getting worse and Fedora (which I'm most familiar with) really sucks now. KDE really sucks now. When I say suck here I mean "does not consistently work ".

I think it is time for me to go back to Slackware Linux. My next Linux installation will be with Slackware and we will see if they too have made it suck in the 18 months or so since I last used it.

Why am I so grumpy today? Well I was given a friend's Sony Vaio RA840G desktop to rebuild. First I attempted to re-install XP, After I finished the installation of XP on a partition using half of the drive (planning a dual boot with Linux) Windows thought it was running from the I: drive. OK, second try I partitioned the other half of the drive first and then Max Blasted the Windows XP partition and re-installed. This time it was running from a C: drive. Next I installed Fedora 10 on the other partition and the GRUB boot loader. I next spent the rest of the Saturday installing software on both operating systems. You know the technique, as you walk by push a buttonThen I tried to install KDE as the Fedora desktop and had all kinds of problems and the system was locking up. Then when I booted back to XP there was no desktop, just the background.

After trying to fix XP I was getting slightly perturbed that a dual boot installation was keeping me up to 1:00AM in the morning two nights in a row and I had probably spent way too many hours on this project. So I took out MAX BLAST again and started from scratch. In about three hours I had Windows 7 installed and all the drivers working including the sound driver and funky Multimedia card along with Office 2007 Enterprise Edition + compatibility Paks + SaveAsPDF, Nero 7, Classic Media Player, WinAmp, AVG Free, and Corel Draw 12. The damn machine looks great, its speed is comparable to XP (somethings faster - somethings not) and it works consistently!

Conclusions

About the only bad thing I can see coming out of this is one day having to directly pay for a licensed copy of Windows.

I better hurry up and check into Slackware.

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