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Originally Posted by
Honduras2811
I guess I'm not doing well at explaining what is going wrong. For the three computers in question, the LAN card is built in, and, even though they are name brand and new, Mickeysoft can't identify them or set them up with usable drivers.
That is to be expected seeing that XP was probably released 10 years before your network card was made. Don't blame MS for that, blame either the Card maker, your vendor or yourself.
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So I find the driver, and you know how much of a hassle that is today
Actually it should not be any problem at all. The mother board should include the correct drivers on the CD that came with it if it is an onboard card. If it is an external card then it should have came with drivers, again if your card or MB did not include drivers that is on them not MS.
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install it, ping around a little to make sure it is working, and then try to get it set up with Mickeysoft. It doesn't give me an option to set it up. It just asks what number I need to dial. The wizard doesn't give me any options I can see at all.
Why would you even be in a Wizard that asks you for a number? That is for dial up internet access not for setting up your network.
All you need to set is the Computer Name and the Workgroup/Domain name and you're done.
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I have to say I've been lucky. I've been using a Dell for the last 7 years and it came with the OS installed. I had a few hardware issues, but no software stuff that took more than a minute to fix. I've forgotten what it was like in the bad old days.
And that explains a lot, Yes if you buy an off the shelf PC and then try to install an OS from strach then you are likely to run into lots of issues as almost none of them include the drivers. Again this is not the fault of MS but the company that build the PC.
Personally I build my own and I never have any problems like you describe. I install the OS and then pop in the CD that came with the motherboard which updates all the inf files for the new hardware, network drivers, audio drivers, CPU, USB and so on, I then set the workgroup name and reboot and everything works like it is supposed to. I then configure the OS the way I want it, add a few pieces of software and make a ghost image so should I need to install again I just run ghost.
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This all really irritates me because I've spent 4 months and thousands of dollars trying to get even one of these up to the standards I was used to. Now, every time I run into something that slows me down, and that is just stupid, I get angry.
So what you should do is stop blameing MS and and buy a PC that meets your needs, never buy a shelf model if you want to custom configure it and if you want to be able to change or reinstall the OS stay away from shelf models. I would not touch a Dell, HP nor Compaq or for that matter any shelf model. If only takes a couple of hours to put one together yourself and you know exactly what you have and you have all the proper drivers. There really is no other way. Most shelf PCs have several inferior pieces of hardware in them to hold the cost down, never include drivers nor a real OS disk and quite often you run into issues if you need to upgrade them, weak PS unit, not enough slots, case to small and so on.
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One of my favorites is that I was trying to install a CD burner with no luck because one of my driver files was out of date. So I got a new driver file, but it wouldn't install because one of my other driver files was out of date. It ended up taking me about 4 hours to get the CD burner installed.
Really, They are usually plug and play, I think the only thing I had to install was the Light Scribe software for making labels and I could burn CDs even before I installed that.
The system I am on right now I built myself.
Large mid tower case
top of the line gigabyte mb with raid, audio and GB lan on board
4gigs ram
DVD burner
2 1TB Sata drives
2 500MB Sata drives Mirrored
NVidia 9600GT 512mb video card
PII 955 BE CPU 4x3.5ghz OC
750 Watt PSU
120mm cooling fans front and rear
after market CPU cooler with 80mm fan
after market GPU cooler with 80mm fan
Total cost of system before adding software was around $700 and that was about 4 years ago.
Same system now could be built for much less and beats the pants off any shelf model for the money plus is easy to upgrade or service