Holy COW!
I had completely forgotten (on the emotional level ; on the concious levels I never ceased to be aware of it , mind me) what a nightmare installing Windows is .

Prequel : This morning , my finds out , her computer refuses to start the *cough* installed "OS" *cough , cough...*
...
..
...
We're talking WindowsME here.....
*COUGH!!!!! *

And I already have been telling her for moths , she needed to install some better protection ; the thing was really overloaded with spy- ad- and other malware.
Oh well.....

Ofcourse , this happened just before I had to leave for work , so I created a quick account for her on my machine , to enable her to at least browse the 'net , manage her sites and check her email.
Promised her to "look into it" when I got home.

Ofcourse : first thing to do was flip in a Linux live-cd and save the important files to another partition.
Done that , then tried to "fix" the system , like they say in the books.
Guess what?
Forget it. Gotta love the inherent crapware , Windows ME is....

So ; the good 'ole "format c:\" was invoked from the prompt.
NOT.....
When booting from the cd , the "format" command is NOT available?!?!?!?!?
Aaaaarrrrrrggggghhhhh.....

In goes the Live-cd again and a solid rm -Rf /mnt/hda1 functioned just as well.

Then.... The Gates (pun intended) Of Hell opened before me :
-1 HOUR bare install (in comparisson : My VL4.3-install takes 25 minutes tops. On a machine with half the specs of my wife's....)
Reboot : didn't count it , but I think it's somewhere around four times.
-Video-card driver : another reboot.
-Soundcard driver : reboot again
-'Net-connection : Y.A.R. (Yet Another Reboot)
-DL-ing AdAware and installing it : Surprise!!!! reboot....
-DL-ing Zone-Alarm and installing it (Despite my wife's qualms about that) : *sigh*..... reboot....
-Installing Norton Antivirus : Guess what? rebooting-time is here again...
-Windows Udate : I'll keep it short : Five reboots

And that's just for getting up a basic sytem to run and on the 'net.....

All in all : spent five hours on installing a (barely workable) OS on my wife's machine to end with something craptastic , that still lacks about 60% of the functionality (that I'm aware of , at least...), my VL-install yields me in one quarter of that time.....

Any further reboots , she can do herself.
(untill the next time that box is cluttered with crap to the rim again.....)

*whimper*

Sounds familiar (though ME is malware all by itself). I installed 2K last night - took me 6 hours to get a usable system (that includes free odffice suite, Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim and the *expletive deleted* service packs and updates)

I think you need to use a boot floppy to format I never had trouble with formatting via a floppy and I'm not sure the command is on the CD. Oh well, if you want to run winme you just need to install like every protection program and you're fine for the malware. Now if you could stop random reboots and lockings but that's just windows...

BTW you don't need to reboot for windows update. Just download the programs loose and keep downloading till you've got everything and then reboot. Never had trouble with it this way. And what took you so long to install it, I never needed more than 2 hours for my basic install (office, internet, sound, video, all antispyware, antivirus, and regcleaners and winamp ultimatezip edit: plus the updates I use)

Well I'm just glad that it finally stopped now Happily using linux now and I'm only going back for some school assignments I can't do in linux.

Two hours, perhaps, but dialup is usually much longer, with IE and Office updates (which most people neglect). Even with a faster connection, it takes a while to load windows, considering all the "after-work" you have to do beyond the original install. Oh, and the fact that you have to reinstall...well, let's ignore that for now. If the processor is slower, I can see an easy two hours to get things up to speed. Hell the reboots on a 666 take nearly 3 minutes a shot, for a fairly unloaded machine.

And then there's the long-lasting fun of running a defrag on any windows machine with a decent sized hard drive. I cringe when I have to do that.

i feel your pain, the most annoying thing about installing windows is its so dummed down. theres no options for anything much, and if something goes wrong all you can really do is start again, thats why reinstalling its so dam common.

whenever i *have* to put that on a pc i use 98lite (for me and 98, xplite for xp/2000) to get rid of all the crap that gets installed by default. its really handy for xp, you can trim off all the upnp, dcom, etc. Makes it a lot safer (relatively speaking )

When I changed my motherboard on my system, Windows 98 rebooted 15 times before it could reconfigure itself to work with the hardware. Needed several different CDs (Windows 98 CD and the OEM driver CDs) before the system could run properly again.

Fedora Core 1 - Rebooted once and kudzu automatically reconfigured everything.

one word: SPYBOT

google for that awesome program... it stops spyware - malware etc. on Windows computers. I use it on my family's windows computers and it stops some problems.

I don't work for the company, but you would think I do... heh.

titanium_geek

Spybot is not enough anymore...