On Wed, 2002-09-04 at 06:48, W. Wayne Liauh wrote: > > Windows p-n-p oftentimes can cause more trouble than good. One of the > worst pitfalls of Windows' p-n-p is that it has the propensity to treat > you like an idiot, insisting that it is right and you're wrong, refusing > to accept the driver you supplied. >
Another annoying aspect of windows p-n-p that I have run into is with Win2k and WinXP, if you install it on one machine, it is exceedingly difficult to transfer that hard drive to another machine, and get to a stage where it will re-detect and configure devices again. Several times I was forced to do a repair or reinstall in cases like this, even between two motherboards with the same chipset and peripherals. In my experience this caused a blue screen of death every boot up attempt, even in Safe Mode. Within Linux it is fairly straight forward to move a hard drive from one computer to another. Most devices will be auto-detected and configured by Kudzu, and the main thing may break is the swap partition which may need to be renamed in /etc/fstab. It has worked this way for me in RH and Mandrake at least. There however is probably a way of booting Windows that "forgets" about all prior devices. I didn't have enough time to look deeply into the documentation at the time.
