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Why Windows is just as much a pain to install as Linux

Okay, so my niece wanted a laptop. She is a student, so all she wanted was the cheapest I could find. Just as well I'm a Sahara dealer. They have a great entry level machine for R3699 plus VAT. Without Windows. "No," says my technophobic neice, "I only know how to work in Windows." So I plumped in the extra few hundred for Windows, and set up a dual-boot machine (hoping to convert her in the long run.)

I plugged the machine into my DSL network and began the process of installation. Because my network uses assigned addresses, not DHCP, the MS installer couldn't get me online to register, so I had to dial in to MS, listen to a recorded voice, and then punch in the approximately 20-digit serial number via the phone's keypad. It took no less than 5 attempts - the MS software couldn't recognise the touch-tone digits! Finally, registration complete, came the download of updates. It took 5 hours!

Then I had to scour the net for an mpeg decoder so that her DVD player could play back DVDs... DVD playback is not included in XP home edition (or whatever it's called).

Of course, installing Firefox, Thunderbird, Inkscape and OpenOffice, and a few other Windows Open Source applications was a breeze, and only took about half an hour.

The Ubuntu installation on sda2 was a simple, one-hour affair, and it included all the software that I had to install separately, and more. And of course, testing Ubuntu on a new laptop is always fun...

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