Reloading Windows sucks when you don't know what you're doing.

[OutHouse]

XP? lol you probably already have been penetrated.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I've *never* gotten helpful windows help. Once the troubleshooter gets through the retarded crap, you get "Fuck if I know", and you're searching online for an answer.

gnu/linux has equally bad, if not worse help, but it gives informative errors, and plenty of logging so you can more easily find an answer.

The best is if you have to call MS support. Part of the reasons companies insist on commercial software is the support, yet if you call MS support you're just getting people in India who are about as knowledgeable as we are and are googling stuff just like we would be doing. Though if they can't figure it out they transfer you to a support engineer. Their coworker who is just another help desk guy in the next cubicle.

 

[Regs]

One issue I found out the hard way is if you try reformatting and installing windows onto a SDD while a regular Sata hard disk is connected to the mobo, windows would install boot drive files on the standard disk. So when I tried to boot from SDD, it would not located the main boot drive. Talk about non-intuitive design.

 

[skull]

lol, linux. I don't have the nerd creds for that.

Linux is easy these days, linux mint is practically windows. I got my computer illiterate buddy running it and the only difference he notices is he can't use his epson printer. I told him before his ex bought him one for christmas that it has to be an hp. She didn't listen and got offended when he said they had to take it back. Long story short he now has an epson printer and no girlfriend.

 

[OutHouse]

Linux is easy these days, linux mint is practically windows. I got my computer illiterate buddy running it and the only difference he notices is he can't use his epson printer. I told him before his ex bought him one for christmas that it has to be an hp. She didn't listen and got offended when he said they had to take it back. Long story short he now has an epson printer and no girlfriend.

yea and thats crap, HP has been around for decades. for Mint not to work on HP is 100% fail. ive also had a hell of a time with wireless working with mint. royal pain in the ass that i just dont have time to give a shit about anymore. windows 10 with no stupid issues like that and makes for a much less stress free day.

 

[holden j caufield]

a few words a virtual machine. I have it backed up externally and snapshot it every week. It can run from almost any machine and I can use it in a windows or linux host. It ports over and no need to install drivers.

 

[skull]

Did you miss the part where his girlfriend bought him an epson not an hp printer. Linux in general has great driver support for hp printers and nvidia video cards. Haven't had a problem with a network card since probably 09 trying to run an old at the time dlink.

I have windows 10 loaded on a seperate ssd just keep the computer open and swap drives. Neither are actually installed just laying on my subwoofer half dangling from the cords. If I need windows for something like turbo tax ssds are great even windows boots in 15 seconds. Most the time linux though, I'd rather not have all that spyware running all the time and not have to worry about malware.

 

[destrekor]

One issue I found out the hard way is if you try reformatting and installing windows onto a SDD while a regular Sata hard disk is connected to the mobo, windows would install boot drive files on the standard disk. So when I tried to boot from SDD, it would not located the main boot drive. Talk about non-intuitive design.

I don't know if it has to do with SSD vs HDD, but there is definitely a weird quirk in there. One of the most important steps these days is to disconnect all other drives that you don't want the Windows installer to touch. There is also a problem where you cannot have too many connected either. Windows wouldn't install for me, discovered I had to disconnect a few drives so that there were no more than 4 total physical disks connected. And then I too found out the weird "my boot drive isn't my Windows drive... WTH?"

I think for me it actually wiped out another bootloader on a different SSD. I might be remembering that wrong though.

 

[pcslookout]

I love redoing windows on my computer!

Do it sometimes to reorganize or just for fun. There is nothing better than a fresh windows machine!

 

[zinfamous]

Linux is easy these days, linux mint is practically windows. I got my computer illiterate buddy running it and the only difference he notices is he can't use his epson printer. I told him before his ex bought him one for christmas that it has to be an hp. She didn't listen and got offended when he said they had to take it back. Long story short he now has an epson printer and no girlfriend.

well, that alone would be a deal-breaker for me. Forced to use an HP printer? lol--I will never spend another dime on those pieces of junk.

But I assume DX (even DX 12?) works on mint, right? I think Steam OS is Linux-based, so it must have some functionality with DX?

 

[ControlD]

Did you miss the part where his girlfriend bought him an epson not an hp printer.

Damnit ... I have a Canon printer not an Epson. Nevermind. Those work fine under Linux btw, so it isn't like you are limited to HP.

 

[ControlD]

well, that alone would be a deal-breaker for me. Forced to use an HP printer? lol--I will never spend another dime on those pieces of junk.

But I assume DX (even DX 12?) works on mint, right? I think Steam OS is Linux-based, so it must have some functionality with DX?

I believe all of the games under Steam are using OpenGL. Valve has supplied some type of DirextX to OpenGL translation software to help people porting games into Linux. Hopefully Vulkan will come along and be the big boost Linux/Mac need to compete with DirectX.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I have a Brother and it works fine in Linux. I never looked into getting the scanner part to work though... that might be more work. I still need to look into CUPS though, I'd like to set it up as a proper network printer and not local. That way I can print to it from any machine/OS/VM etc if I want to. But I really don't do much printing so it's one of those things I don't really think of playing with. I find printing in Linux can be weird though. Like often you can't print a web page directly as it will actually print an error on the paper, you need to print it to PDF then print the PDF. This is the kind of crap that makes Linux not ready IMO. It's gotten better though but still has lot of annoyances like that.