I've had a number of laptops with buggy unsupported drivers for XP. I don't have any of these here with me right now but this has happened to me with a number o

I've had a number of laptops with buggy unsupported drivers for XP. I don't have any of these here with me right now but this has happened to me with a number of relatively common models from HP and Dell, when installing XP over Vista (can't recall if Win 7 was available at the time). The company had not moved their support package images to Vista, for compatibility and security reasons - telecom company with funky email servers and a policy of installing as old and boring software as possible. There simply was no support. The solution HP, Dell and MS would give is to "get on with the times and migrate" which wasn't possible at the time. Alternatively, buy another computer with specific XP support. Complaints were met with a "RTF EULA" where it stated that no support was guaranteed for other OS than the preinstalled one. The solution was to buy new laptops with WinXP support (ended up costing more, since the company specifically needed serial ports and not many machines had them + WinXP support, limiting choice). Ubuntu installed flawlessly with absolutely every feature the hardware supported.(This happened when we basically had to either find some new usage for the machines or throw them away). Much quicker than XP too, and objectively simpler as it would choose reasonable defaults instead of asking esoteric questions, making us call phone numbers or insisting in us registering anything. The single thing XP has on Ubuntu or Mint regarding installation, is that you often don't have to do it yourself. In some respects it's worse with newer MS systems as their DRM has "intensified" and OEMs ship more resilient bloatware/rootkits. Small division within biggish company, so the process was followed by some of us, including me although I wasn't in IT.