THE FIRST TIME I installed Microsoft Windows on a PC was in 1986, I think. That was on an AST 8MHz 286. I don't have the diskettes any more, but I seem to remember it took about 30 minutes. There were only a couple of apps for it, Micrografx Draw and Aldus Pagemaker. It looked pretty. Yes it did. Pretty. An operating environment that sat on DOS and continued to sit on DOS for a long time after, and not nearly as fast as DR DOS' GEM graphical user interface, but hey...
I've just spent a fair old time - about 50 minutes or so - installing Microsoft Windows XP Professional on a new machine here. I got the software just after it was launched. A quick smurf to the Windows Update site tells me that I need to download 53 critical updates, 24 XP updates and one driver update.
Then this morning I had to re-install Windows 2000 Pro on this machine. Why? Well, the previous installation stopped working. I don't know why. I don't see how I could have been hit by a worm or a virus and if I have it's one that no-one else has got yet.
KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED is a common enough BSOD error message, that's for sure.
Despite leaky capacitors and the occasional glitch with hard drives, it seems to me after 20 years of working with this bananas that the hardware vendors including the CPU makers, are so much more careful and so much more reliable than Microsoft ever could be. Heck, how many times have we wished Intel would just write the operating system as well as make the X86 chips! We've even asked senior Intel executives many a time. They never answer, sadly.
Since 1986 I've installed Windows so many times that I've quite forgotten all the problems I've encountered with the different versions. Along the way I've installed DOSes of various types including IBM DOS and DR DOS of various sorts, OS/2 Presentation Manager, OS/2 with Win32 support, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 3.11, Windows for Warehouses, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows NT for Workstations, Windows 2000, Windows XP. I've never installed Windows ME, it's not just me.
Microsoft has a history of the Windows operating system at this
page
It says: "With Windows, the graphical user interface (GUI) area at Microsoft had begun.
You may be wondering why Microsoft doesn't spend much time discussing Windows in the late 1980s. This would be because in 1987 it and IBM were agreed that OS/2 Presentation Manager was the best thing since sliced bread. But Microsoft got tired of Big Blue messing about, and the rifts led to Windows 3.0, which was so cool, Bill Gates thought, that Microsoft flew a whole heap of us hacks over to New York for a day or two for the launch.
No, I forget what other flavours and operating systems I've installed, although I liked SuSE Linux 9.0 and I'd like to forget how many times I've had to re-install Windows. But I can't.
So why am I not using SuSE Linux? It's because I'm used to all the software packages that I've had to re-learn over the years. The SuSE GUIs weren't too hard to learn. You notice that Windows changes in look and feel every time there's a major re-jig? The training companies love Microsoft for this. Just like the hard drive companies and the peripherals firms do. It's a bandwagon that's rolled on and on forever.
I'm quite relieved that Longhorn won't be out for a long time, and I'm glad I don't have a 64-bit CPU so that I don't have to worry about installing WinXP even though I'd have to wait for that anyway.
Source:
The INQ!
Linear Mode
