Reinstalling windows was domain knowledge on a per PC basis, in my experience. I had a draft UDMA/66 port on which I wanted my MASTER IDE (for performance), bu

Reinstalling windows was domain knowledge on a per PC basis, in my experience. I had a draft UDMA/66 port on which I wanted my MASTER IDE (for performance), but Windows would not install on anything above UDMA/33. It would run fine once installed, however. The procedure was straight forward, but IDEs didn't announce its presence, instead there were manual MASTER/SLAVE jumpers on the drive themselves that would have to line up with the manually configured BIOS settings. Once Windows was installed, everything had to be physically pulled out, ports and cables changed, jumpers and BIOS checked or configured, enabling UDMA/66 (and thus disabling the 2nd IDE port, but not 3 and 4) and you could start using the OS. And Windows installation would BSOD with the network card in, so that would have to be added later but before downloading the necessary WaReZ. I also got into Linux at the very end of the 2.4 line, and vividly recall how everything changed to be more user-friendly with the 2.6 series of kernels.