way OT is it just me or does Win XP always screw up

[bobdea]

Okay a friend recently got hight speed access from his cable company anyway there are a few machines in that house so he asked me how to hook up more than one so I tell hime to get a route or whatever its called he doesnt want to drill holes in th walls or floor and since his laptop has a wireless card he wants wireless for the whole house just for the sake of ease

so we get all the gear the laptop (mac)works fine the emac works fine both with minimal config his friends linux laptop with wireless works with a little config

now enter the desktop running XP upstairs put in the wireless card install the drivers and after going through on of those wizards it works later on he reboots the machine

wireless doesnt work anymore can see network connects then disconnect

reinstall the drivers still doesnt and we do everything you can think of to try to make it work so to test the card I pop it in my old Dell running linux after some setup time it works just fine EVEN after I reboot so all esle has failed I call tech support for the card maker wait on hold for a moment so we go through a bunch of stuff with her she says it should work and that the card is pretty standard based and should just work but its the network settings that must be wacked and that with XP in some cases when changes in preferences are made they dont stick she gave me a reason but I forgot what it was anyway with a bunch more hand holding from her we got it to work and stay working

is this common or did I just have really bad luck?

after this eXPerience I can tell you I have even less respect for a company that makes 95% of the installed OSes in the home market but yet is still not all that easy to use at times not that linux is but its free and if there is a aspect I do not like about it if I can write code I can change it

and I certainly wont be buying anything with windows installed on it in the near future

no need to pay for a OS I will not use

[Guest AlpentalRider]

did you check to see if the network card passed diagonistics tests and ran ipconfig?

I have noticed that when adding XP machines to a network, you sometimes need to do an "ipconfig /release" followed by an "ipconfig /renew" for it to pick up the new network settings.

The new version of the OS does so much behind the scenes, that when things go wrong you have to know exactly how to troubleshoot to fix it. That's been my big complaint with XP, and is the main reason all my business pcs still run Win2k Pro.