There was a joke about Windows that went like this... Centuries from now, an extraordianry advacned alien race found the remains of humanity... Through the wrecks they found something identified by humans by the name "PCs". After months of investigations, they found the source of humanity's decline lying in a very destructive virus that ran on 90% of the world's PCs. Only thing is, it was not a virus. It was Windows

Anyways, this is what came in my mind when I saw the BSODs and Windows XP just wouldn't want to start.. I believe Windows XP comes from "Windows-eXPect-a-crash". The full story?

I had an old AMD K6III @ 500Mhz with 192 MB of RAM, GF2MX200 w 64MB and a 60 gig HDD. I got hold of a "new" pc, in fact an Athlon @ 800 w/ 768 RAM , GF2GTS w 64MB, basically a complete new PC, plus a new monitor.

On the old PC I had both Wndows and Linux (MDK) installed, so I decided to swap the HDDs between the two systems... . First thing I did, boot up Linux, configured all the hardware changes. (and i really mean ALL of them), then surprise... after an NVIDIA reinstall, i had my old PC's desktop on the new one No reinstall, no nothing. Simply Plug'n'Configure'n'Play

I was curioues 'bout Windows' state... So, what did I do? I restarted and waited to see the Windows XP logo, which I saw for about 1-2 secs and then a nice BSOD. Restart? No good. Windows XP was DEAD in the water ... Only way out? FORMAT C:

To sum up, Linux managed to find its way through a COMPLETE hardware change, in comparison to Windows XP that BSODed even in Safe Mode.

10x Bill Gates for making possible for me to see the difference between a real OS and an OS for secretaries'n'playing Solitaire

there are few way to migrate windows from one hardware to another - basically the problem are teh drivers that are different, so there are scripts to prepare the registry (remove the special drivers and replace them by standard i386) after this you can put the drive into another pc ...
You can try to repair your windows by booting from the install cd saying that you want to install again and after the setup detects "another version " of it's own than say R.
it copies all the system files again and setups the standard drivers
when you reboot it recognizes all the hardware and sets up drivers for it ...

it's written on their site

the problem is it works 8 out of 10 times


The problem with windows like Linuz said is that they make a crappy OS

I personally prefer linux :-)

I was annoyed that I had to reinstall windows (this was the quickest way), as opposed to Linux, where I had to do some low level confiogs and that was all... NO RESTART, no BSOD, no nothing... I guess it's in their nature to build OSes. Crappy ones

I DON'T PAY FOR CRAP !!!

I DON'T BUY FIREWALLS !!!

I DON'T HAVE TO REBOOT !!!

I DON'T LIKE SUITS AND TIES !!!

I LIKE AND USE LINUX !!!

The thing I've found lately which has been convenient in Linux is video card swapping. In Windows, the video card driver is extremely video card specific. Since I use custom resolutions, it was a real pain to swap video cards. Every time I swapped video cards, Windows would install a new driver with its standard resolutions and then I'd have to go in and tediously set up my custom resolutions all over again.

With Linux, all I usually have to do is change at most one line in my XF86Config. Most of my video cards are Ati, so I can leave the XF86Config alone. If I switch to something else I just change the driver from "ati" to "vesa". I don't have to lose my custom resolutions or reconfigure anything!

This is just like my case, where I had a GeForce 2MX 400 w/ 64MB of RAM and swapped it for a GeForce2 GTS w/ 64MB of RAM. All I needed to do was to recompile the NVidia kernel module to suit my new card.... A simple matter of telinit 3; ./NVIDIA-installer... -a; telinit 5;

The thing that bugs me about windows XP is if my resolution is 1024x768 and all my icons are spread the way I like them on the desktop, switching down to 800x600 and back to 1024x768, rearranges all my icons, and I have to put them back to their places. Linux simply "scrolls" the screen. NVidia recently introduced this feature on Windows drivers, but killed my CPU while scrolling... so it;s back to "Where was this stupid icon supposed to be?!?"