What I use now is: Silver + cracked uxtheme.dll and Resource Hacker to make all the ugly green things into a darkish blue, with customizations all over the place. (Eg, hover text on start button reads: "Click here to begin. I ALREADY KNEW THAT *******.")

Resource Hacker and the uxtheme.dll are both free and fairly easy to obtain and don't come with any luggage at all. If anyone here still uses XP, this method is highly recommended!

You shouldn't support Belkin either. They make the biggest #$%@^ pieces of @$@#$^#@#%@%^#@@&**!!!!! I really despise their equipment.

I try to support Atheros as they seem to make good drivers for Linux. I'm using one now; ar5007eg. Works out of the box on most newer GNU/Linux distributions...

It was cheapest and i am on an extremely tight budget.

It's always the cheapest because it's crap. Customers buy them for that reason and then expect me to configure them for free, but they frequently just don't work and can't be made to, and they take twice as long at a minimum to the other common brands. They cost me time and money. I'm actually telling the girls that take the orders to start telling the customers that they are on their own if they buy Belkin.

I can configure my own thank you.

I would assume so, but most people can't even plug them in correctly. Sad but true. I do at least 4 service calls each week, and sometimes that many in a day where someone was told to unplug their router and plug it back in and has managed to get every wire wrong.

Ok, so I'll reply to a couple of users in one shot.

first of all, the time it takes to install and find drivers really doesn't matter anymore because of imaging, which can be done in a matter of minutes on a gigabyte network.


2nd: If you don't like XP's interface there's a ton of software available to really sweeten it up. like:

http://www.stardock.com/products/

http://www.astonshell.com/a2menu/ (uses opengl)

http://windows.kde.org/

You can easily make XP look like OSX, Gnome, KDE, or something totally different made by artists. The cursors, icons, sounds, themes can be modified in XP. And 7 is even better.

Why do you always reference XP? It was released just shy of 9 years ago. Even microsoft wishes it would die. I bet windows 98 would absolutely FLY on my current hardware if drivers could be found.

DSL is faster then win 95 on old hw!

Not if you install PC's for a living you don't. And I do it for 10 years now. Arghhhh. If you want to install XP with all the patches and bells and whistles like .Net, and all Applications people need to start using it as soon as they (read "I") plug it in without my second, third, etc visit, on a new PC you see for the first time takes minimum 4 Hours. Automated!!!

And if you are reinstalling PC for a new customer,and try to use backuped settings from previous installation, add another 1-2 hours to do it right.

Then add 30 minutes to create a Ghost copy and another 45-60 minutes if you have to reinstall so you first have to backup their old/ruined system.

And if you try even to imply that it does not take you that much time you are either ignorant, slacker or a HUGE LIAR. Take your pick or better accept that after 10 years of installing PC's for a living I DO KNOW what I am talking about. This includes PC's from 286 to SLI powered monsters, and from DOS 5.x to Windows 7 with all of the incarnations in between.

your right Mat !.... vista worked well with the wifi. My wife likes windows but the advent dual core laptop died, so in went a new hard drive, partitioned it with two NTFS partitions... installed XP (about 40 minutes with no problems), installed MINT 8 with GRUB (roughly the same amout of time, no problems).
set up my toolbars and themes (10 minutes).... used the wi-fi with firefox and installed 'flash' (5 minutes) great !!!

re-booted into XP and started installing the drivers from the OEM disk, and after three hours of trying to get the WIFI working I have given up. The issue is with the drivers, the SAD thing is that I am not at all surprised by these events.



Graham

Yeah, if you use imaging, or customised install media, or any of a range of possibilities, installing Windows isn't so bad. But preparing the image/media/whatever takes a lot of time.

Also, when I was installing Vista on a bunch of machines by using Windows PE and imagex, the time WinPE took to format the hard drive was itself well over half an hour. Not even a particularly big drive. Maybe I'd missed out some quicker way to do it, but I'd followed Microsoft's own documentation on the matter.

But in Linux the desktop itself is theme-able without third-party addons. And you are free to use a completely different desktop if you want, because Linux does not have any desktop or GUI integrated into it.

In fact the distro I use doesn't have a GUI when you install it. It's optional. If you want it, install it yourself.

One of the best thing about Unix is that it's modular. It's just a whole bunch of little, separate programs that work together to make up a usable system, unlike Windows's inpenetrable icky ball of cruft engulfing pretty much everything.

And as mentioned, Linux programs each have their own, sepatate human-readable and editable config files, each for every user, instead of a registry.

In GNU/Linux, the whole concept of "third party" has little meaning, since everything is made by different people. As you mention, GNU/Linux distros are formed by the combination of many components, any of which can be changed for an alternative.

A better way to express it would be "Most distros have a highly configurable desktop by default".