Drivers? Don’t talk to me about drivers
Yet again, I butted up against the supposed ease of installation and configuration of Windows (in this case, XP). I passed a ThinkPad T40 on to a friend of mine and, because he’s all thumbs when it comes to computers (except for using certain software), I offered to help him install XP.
Why XP? He needs to run certain software for which there’s no equivalent in Linux, and since he has a valid licence key for XP he decided to use it. I tried to persuade him to try Ubuntu, but no luck.
The installation went well — there’s no real difference between installing XP and Ubuntu. Well, Ubuntu asks you a few more questions. But when it came to setting up the laptop, things took a different course.
What the????
There was no audio. No ethernet. And, most importantly, no wireless. The hardware wasn’t recognized, and didn’t appear in the device manager. So much for auto detection and plug-and-play. And this was a ThinkPad. Good old IBM hardware. Not strange, non-standard components from some obscure firm somewhere.
Luckily, I had my laptop with me and I was able to scoot over to the Lenovo site and download the drivers. I got them installed, and everything worked. But should all that have been necessary?
The Ubuntu experience
A while back, I installed Ubuntu on exactly the same hardware. Well, not exactly — the hard drive on that ThinkPad was a 40 GB model. And guess what? Ubuntu automatically detected my hardware. Ethernet, wireless, audio … they all worked without me having to go into a repository or download and compile a driver. They just worked.
Admittedly, everyone’s mileage (or whatever distance measure they use) will vary. But I’ve always had driver problems when installing Windows — from version 3.1 up to XP.
Downloading and installing is easy, right
Maybe yes, maybe no. The Lenovo support page for ThinkPad T40 drivers contains a lot of entries. For wireless drivers, there are four or five options. Luckily, I knew what to download. If you’re not familiar with the hardware on your system (and most computer users aren’t), you’d have a tough time choosing the right wireless driver. You might get lucky the first time, but I doubt it.
That begs the question: If Ubuntu can get these things working out of the box, why can’t Windows? Same hardware, different results.
And guess what my friend said after this little drama? Maybe we should have installed Ubuntu …
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September 13th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Well, XP is not the actual version of Windows… and I suppose you didn’t install a Linux distribution of 2002, did you?
The question is: how does Vista get along with this Laptop – if you want to do a fair comparison!
Anyway, good written article!
September 13th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
[...] Drivers? Don’t talk to me about drivers Yet again, I butted up against the supposed ease of installation and configuration of Windows (in this case, XP). I passed a ThinkPad T40 on to a friend of mine and, because he’s all thumbs when it comes to computers (except for using certain software), I offered to help him install XP. [...]
September 14th, 2008 at 2:16 am
@Johannes:
Good point. However, we were installing Windows XP, with service pack 2. Released in 2004. One year after the ThinkPad T40 hit the market.
October 21st, 2008 at 2:56 pm
I had an exact same situation. I had to install Windows XP in Thinkpad T40 for my friend. As you mentioned the ethernet, wifi and audio didnt work. I didnt have my laptop with me . But I had a Ubuntu live CD. I booted up with Live CD. Ethernet , wifi , audio worked fine. Got the list of hardware with a simple command “lspci” and searched internet for windows xp drivers. Since Ubuntu can read and write NTFS Partition I saved everything in the harddisk. Did a restart and installed all the drivers. Neat trick..
Few days later After my friend after getting used to Ubuntu thro live cd, Installed Ubuntu by himself. I think days when we “average users” thought linux is difficult to install and use.