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So, Saturday night, I was at my parent’s house, and, knowing that my dad had received the wireless cards he’d ordered, I asked if I could have the one I loaned him back. Not so easy. Turns out, he hadn’t been able to get them working in any of the three of his computers.
One of them was easy. It was the laptop I’d sold him recently, that had a clean install of XP from retail media recently put on it, and I just popped in the card, and the CD, and it installed. No conflicts or issues.
The other two were much harder. I also installed the 98 laptop, since that was the one he’d spent hours working on, and I just assumed that the HP XP laptop would work like the Sony. Anyway, after hacking around a long time (it couldn’t find the Windows install CD), I managed to get the drivers to install, and the card to work. Not too surprising, 98 predated wireless cards by years, and it was never that easy to install hardware on 98 anyway.
So, yesterday morning, my dad calls me up saying that he couldn’t get the other XP laptop (the HP) to install. I just complained that it couldn’t find the driver, no matter what he did. I did a bit of phone walkthrough, and decided he should bring the laptop over. Among other things, we could update it from behind my firewall on my cable modem, rather than on my dad’s naked dialup. And, I could install the card myself.
He shows up with the laptop, and, much to my surprise, I couldn’t get it to install either. It just refused to find the drivers, even after I downloaded them from the internet and pointed explititly at them. Anyway, we managed to get it to work, by pointing at the install directory in Program Files. Don’t ask me why the Sony found it and the HP didn’t. I blame the stupid, trumped up, OEM XP install on it.
People say that there are too many Linux Distros, and that the fragmentation of the Linux is a problem. However, Windows is just as fragmented, because every OEM has made their own modifications to Windows, that make them enough different that drivers and software don’t work. The above is living proof.
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