Wireless weirdness (was: NT Stuff)

Hewitt Tech hewitt_tech at attbi.com
Wed Jan 15 12:16:53 EST 2003


Thing is though Ben, the machine I had the most trouble with was
manufactured by a now merged PC company called Compaq. With the original
factory installation the machine wouldn't run more than an hour or so
without crashing or blue screening. You're probably quite right about a lot
of systems not being on the HCL but there were at least two AMD K6 specific
fixes in Windows 9x and neither quite did the trick. In fact I don't
remember ever seeing a stable AMD K6 based system. On the plus side, Linux
is running on most of them! ;^)

-Alex

----- Original Message -----
From: <bscott at ntisys.com>
To: "Greater NH Linux User Group" <discuss at gnhlug.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 12:00 PM
Subject: Re: Wireless weirdness (was: NT Stuff)


On Wed, 15 Jan 2003, at 11:21am, hewitt_tech at attbi.com wrote:
> If I had a nickel for every hour I've spent chasing windows problem... ;^(

  Amen to that.

> P.S. My favorite (not) windows bugs are the ones associated with the AMD
> K6 processors.  You end up with a very unstable machine but when you put
> Linux or any of the NT variants on these systems magically everything
> works.

  Keep in mind that the HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) for Microsoft
Windows is a lot shorter than the pool of available hardware.  If it is not
on the HCL, Microsoft makes no promises as to whether Windows will work.
In the case of many K6 motherboards I've used, they were not on the HCL, and
for a good reason -- Windows crashed constantly on them.

  My point here is not to defend Windows, but rather, to promote Linux: Many
people point to the fact that vendors "always" provide Windows drivers, but
not always Linux drivers.  However, once you start installing third-party
drivers, what stability Windows has goes right down the toilet.  If you
instead confine yourself to the HCL (like Microsoft tells you to), the
hardware support picture becomes much more balanced.

--
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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