I never thought this day would come. Seriously, after all my suffering with Microsoft software over the last fifteen years, I never thought this day would come, but it has. What has happened, you ask? I'll tell you. Brace yourself, dear reader, and be sure to take a seat or perhaps lie down, for I have a tale to tell that will shock you. To be blunt: a Microsoft product installed itself correctly and works.
Seriously, you heard that right. I couldn't believe it either, but it's true: a Microsoft product installed itself correctly and works. I've written previously about the woes I had installing Windows XP for the first time, as well as the largely nonsensical fixes/workarounds that I discovered. Despite all the problems, Windows XP really is the best OS Microsoft has ever developed, and I've been wanting to install it on my laptop as well. Until today, however, I didn't have the guts to do it, but I was so tired of the decaying sack of dung that is Windows ME, I just couldn't put it off any longer.
Of course, I did do my best to make sure it would install cleanly. I forgot to update my system BIOS, but the laptop just came back from the repair center—it needed a new motherboard after it died completely as chronicled elsewhere—so I figured it probably had the latest. I uninstalled pretty much all the software I had installed under Windows ME to make sure there was plenty of disk space free. I disabled all applications that start with Windows to make sure none of them could get in the way. I removed my wireless PC card and reconfigured the laptop's networking through its standard Intel adapter. I even defragged the hard drive to make sure that wouldn't be an issue.
Maybe it all paid off. I don't know. What I do know is that the installation routine proceeded without a hitch. It asked me questions from time to time, but it detected everything correctly, installed Windows XP without a single problem, and everything worked on the very first boot. And I mean everything. Even my network was active and available from the first time the computer restarted. The system even detected the maximum resolution and color depth for my screen and configured itself accordingly. My touchpad worked in tandem with my external mouse. My sound was functional.
In fact, the system works better than it used to, and it doesn't seem to have the problems my desktop system has with Windows XP. To this day, I still can't get one of my all-time favorite games, Dungeon Keeper II (DK2), to run on my desktop computer. For the record, very few people can get it to work under Windows XP, it seems; i.e., it either works or it doesn't, and few tweaks seem to be useful from what I've read. Frankly, DK2 wouldn't run on my laptop under Windows ME, so I figured it had about a snowball's chance in Hell of working under Windows XP.
Bizarrely enough, though, that's incorrect; DK2 actually runs under Windows XP on my laptop! Does that make any sense? I mean, my desktop system has such wildly obscure components as a stock GeForce3 video card, a Creative Labs SB-Live! sound card, etc., while my laptop has a host of funky components I've never heard of with a stock GeForce2 video system. Still, it seems the latter is somehow "more compatible" than the former. Go figure.
Suffice it to say that Microsoft has done something right with Windows XP. I can't believe it installed correctly and works, but it did and it does. Of course, I'm now in software hell trying to get every other vendor's junk to install and work on my system (it looks like the third attempt to install Norton Personal Firewall 2002 is actually going to work, unlike the previous two attempts), but at least I didn't have to fight for days to make the operating system itself work. Kudos, Microsoft! Keep doing whatever it is you did with XP! Windows is finally a real operating system!
08/21/2002