Windows XP reloading like a bad nightmare

As I work from day to day in my shiny Windows 7 operating system I simply think to myself "Self...How did I ever get along without some of these features for so long". However, looking around you will find people buying laptops and having them reloaded with Windows XP. Participating in this ritual of reloading is like taking part in a badly written movie. You know the one where it starts out with unbelievably bad opening credits to the muscular dude hitting on the chick....only goes downhill from there. Each laptop I get is like receiving a basket labeled Humpty Dumpty. Some of these machines take hours to piece together all of the drivers the computer manufactures swear won't work with XP. Trust me don't try calling either because they have the line down to a science about we don't support that operating system and if you would like to install the original one they would be more than happy to help you or worse yet that unit is out of warranty. I had the pleasure of spending a day reloading two Acer Aspire machines recently and while one was relatively easy, mostly due to the fact that there was a page with every single driver for the machine out there, the other took hours of searching for the correct wireless driver. During this endeavor I did discover a new tool to help me better pin down what I was looking for as far as model of the card. The worst part about it was that I found a page with the supposed "correct" driver all over the Internet but none of them worked. While cursing and doing an intense voodoo chant I stumbled upon the answer indirectly. I went into device manager and looked on the details tab. I changed to the hardware id's and then typed the first string in to my google search. I found lots of pages that I had tried before but one was a diamond in the rough. Luckily I was able to extract it via google translate, Yes it was in french. The second bonus the author of the article had a rar file with the inf and driver file. So what have we learned from this. Even though an item is marked as unknown and has a hideous yellow triangle with an exclamation point there are some things windows can still tell you about the item to help you along to find the right device. I still think people should learn to deal with Windows 7 as it is a beautifully designed operating system that is far more stable than it's older sibling's. It takes getting used to just like a new pair of shoes but I promise once you break them in you will soon enough start to run.

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