Windows Hardware Woes

I’ve been in tech for a little over eight years now, and during that time I’ve had several hardware problems similar to what the writer of this article ran into when setting up a small office. Switching to Ubuntu is probably a great idea in his case, as it will also make it easier for him to do remote support and maintenance in addition to the hardware advantages.

For example, I once had to troubleshoot some problems in a small office environment. They had virues all through the workstations, one of them so bad I had to wipe the machine and start over (the owner’s teenage daughter spent a lot of time on peer-to-peer networks). I dreaded what the server had in store for me, as I had no idea what their backup practices were. It turned out I didn’t have to do a thing on the server because whoever did the initial install used Linux. One simple Samba setup and a few batch scripts to handle backups and voila, they were good to go.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and say Linux is without its own hardware problems. Far from it. But when it comes to some hardware, Windows is no easier than Linux. Techs just take a lot of Windows hardware for granted because we’ve been working with it for ages. Sure, I’ve got a webcam I still have to wrestle with on Linux, but a friend of mine has a TV tuner card I once spent three hours on and still didn’t get working properly, even using several different versions of the manufacturer’s own drivers and software.

The main difference in the article writer’s case becomes one of simple freedom. If he could have just laid down a barebones Windows install, he would most likely have been in far better shape and Windows would have that much less bad PR in circulation (yes, it’s one article, but it hit /. and, I’d imagine, plenty of blogs). There is no reason for Microsoft to limit vendors like they do beyond controlling who installs what where. It doesn’t matter to them that you have a legal copy and that you’re trying to install other legal hardware, they only care that you bought a machine with Windows and by God you better only use it on that machine. (If that weren’t the case, they wouldn’t have dreamed up the reinstall restrictions on
Vista, and people wouldn’t have had to bitch so loud to get it removed.)

Meanwhile Linux supports at least as much hardware out of the box these days, and you have far more flexibility over what gets installed and what doesn’t. If you don’t like the way one distribution handles hardware (or software!) installation, you can try another. You don’t have to mess with reigstrations and activations, and driver’s aren’t sandbagged with extra vendor software or spyware. There’s also a good reason many of us on the Tech Geeks list keep copies of Knoppix around: we have a lot better luck recovering data and testing hardware with it than we do Windows.

This is why, as long as I can’t afford a MacBook Pro, I’ll be contentedly running some flavor of Linux.