I'm on an old Win98 box right now because I'm at my parent's house for a few nights. The machine didn't have a sound card so I found an old Ensoniq AudioPCI and installed that. Found some drivers online, unpacked them, and instead of an installation script running, a damn notepad window opens up with instructions on how to find the driver installation package and run it from a command line.
Okay, if the programmers knew enough about automation that they could open an instance of notepad, and they knew where the installation file was extracted, why the hell couldn't they just have ran the installation file? Would it really be so difficult and so much more extra work to point the autorun to the file that was just 2 seconds ago extracted, rather than typing up a text file with instructions on how to navigate to c:windows\temp\90210 and run install.exe? Seriously, why the hell would anyone do that? To be sure, it is certainly not difficult to browse to that folder, but on a celeron 733 running win98 with 128 mb of PC100 ram, it takes a while, especially since Windows Explorer has to read the CD as I open it because of course when I'm clicking on C:, I need to know exactly what is in the CD drive and have to wait for it to spin up and read the disc, then wait for all the subfolders to be populated.
Then, the Windows driver installation after copying a few files, mysteriously forgets where it was just looking and tells me to insert the Ensoniq AudioPCI CD-ROM. Then I have to click browse. point it back to the folder it was just in but forgot about, and let it finish. But oh wait, it's not done! It needs the Win98 CD now! Never mind that it's in the damn drive, it's looking for it in the Program Files folder!
Now I remember why I like XP so much better.
Okay, if the programmers knew enough about automation that they could open an instance of notepad, and they knew where the installation file was extracted, why the hell couldn't they just have ran the installation file? Would it really be so difficult and so much more extra work to point the autorun to the file that was just 2 seconds ago extracted, rather than typing up a text file with instructions on how to navigate to c:windows\temp\90210 and run install.exe? Seriously, why the hell would anyone do that? To be sure, it is certainly not difficult to browse to that folder, but on a celeron 733 running win98 with 128 mb of PC100 ram, it takes a while, especially since Windows Explorer has to read the CD as I open it because of course when I'm clicking on C:, I need to know exactly what is in the CD drive and have to wait for it to spin up and read the disc, then wait for all the subfolders to be populated.
Then, the Windows driver installation after copying a few files, mysteriously forgets where it was just looking and tells me to insert the Ensoniq AudioPCI CD-ROM. Then I have to click browse. point it back to the folder it was just in but forgot about, and let it finish. But oh wait, it's not done! It needs the Win98 CD now! Never mind that it's in the damn drive, it's looking for it in the Program Files folder!
Now I remember why I like XP so much better.
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