4 ms·

It's actually pretty easy these days. I haven't seen a single machine since about 2008 that doesn't work straight away off a vanilla windows cd. occasionally y

by spongle 13y ago

It's actually pretty easy these days. I haven't seen a single machine since about 2008 that doesn't work straight away off a vanilla windows cd. occasionally you get a missing graphics driver but windows update just pulls a WHQL driver. As for recovery DVDs: these are the first point of call usually and are pretty good generally. there are many paths and they are all navigable by an average user.

tluyben2 13y ago
Yeah ok, I didn't know that. I have the same experience with Linux these days, but I'm not a good example. I know what hardware to buy and what distro's to use in what cases. The last Windows install I personally did was Windows 7 on a 2007 Acer and 2009 Toshiba and that was an incredibly horrible experience; almost nothing worked out of the box and finding drivers was hard ('no drivers found' was the message and on the vendor sites it said that it didn't have drivers for Win7 yet; the drivers for XP half worked and half did not). Needless to say this was not the DVD or partition I installed; I used a shiny new Win7 USB. I think though that although some people will reinstall their system (why?), it should not be needed and that's where we are growing to with, on the low end, tablets (mostly linux: android)/chromeos (linux)/windows laptops and on the higher end macbooks. These machines get thrown out before a reinstall would be needed by the less computer savvy (and even by the computer savvy who earn too much :). In the mac space people buy a new macbook / iPad when the new shiny upgrades are announced (october?) and on the other end of the spectrum people abuse the stuff OR it gets 'too slow' and replace it. In between is the high end Windows market, which, so far, seems to be split between business users (which are more and more going tablet), high end gaming and geeks. And those three all do (or their company does) in fact reinstall / upgrade (hard and soft) their systems. But that's very far from 'most users'.

by spongle 13y ago

tluyben2 13y ago

Yeah ok, I didn't know that. I have the same experience with Linux these days, but I'm not a good example. I know what hardware to buy and what distro's to use in what cases. The last Windows install I personally did was Windows 7 on a 2007 Acer and 2009 Toshiba and that was an incredibly horrible experience; almost nothing worked out of the box and finding drivers was hard ('no drivers found' was the message and on the vendor sites it said that it didn't have drivers for Win7 yet; the drivers for XP half worked and half did not). Needless to say this was not the DVD or partition I installed; I used a shiny new Win7 USB. I think though that although some people will reinstall their system (why?), it should not be needed and that's where we are growing to with, on the low end, tablets (mostly linux: android)/chromeos (linux)/windows laptops and on the higher end macbooks. These machines get thrown out before a reinstall would be needed by the less computer savvy (and even by the computer savvy who earn too much :). In the mac space people buy a new macbook / iPad when the new shiny upgrades are announced (october?) and on the other end of the spectrum people abuse the stuff OR it gets 'too slow' and replace it. In between is the high end Windows market, which, so far, seems to be split between business users (which are more and more going tablet), high end gaming and geeks. And those three all do (or their company does) in fact reinstall / upgrade (hard and soft) their systems. But that's very far from 'most users'.