Installing Windows

Microsoft and many people on the Web are claiming that Windows can now be installed by a novice computer user. After installing on my computer, I thought that installation had certainly come a long way. But after my experience helping another user install on his computer, I beg to differ.

Our plan was to back up everything, take some Windows settings with Windows Easy Transfer (a program for moving settings and files to a new or freshly installed computer), wipe the hard drive, and create two partitions: one for data and one for the system files. Fairly standard procedure. (For those of you who don't know, a partition is just a section on a hard drive that appears as a separate drive, allowing you to, in effect, split one physical drive into multiple drives.) So we backed up, put the CD in the drive, restarted, and got into the partitioner. We set things up as planned, then moved on with the installation, which was amazingly simple, elegant, and fast.

Then we got into Windows for the first time after waiting about 20 minutes for copying files. It looked great until I realized that we had selected the data partition as the system partition and vice versa (one was significantly larger than the other). Oh, well, haven't done much yet, so just re-install. But it would have been nice if the installer had been clearer, because once you're done partitioning, you would naturally hit "Next" in the installer. The only hint that it wasn't quite so simple was the title "Select the drive you want to install Windows on," indicating that the entry you had selected when you hit Next would select the system drive. It would have been much better to open a second dialog box if you wanted to modify the partitions, and not provide a way to change partitions from the selection window. Minor bad design there; a novice user would probably not have changed the partition table, though, and thus would not have hit this problem, so I can't really cite this as part of my argument.

Once this worked, we opened Registry Editor and told it to put the desktop and other data folders onto the data partition in folders we had set up, finishing the partitioning arrangement. (If you don't get that, you don't need to to understand the rest.) Worked great. We installed a few other programs, then took an image backup of the hard drive in case we had to restore it later. Then, satisfied that the installation had finished, and that the user could copy his data files back the next day, I left.

The next day, I headed back over to deal with any problems, and to explain some of the new features. When I arrived, I learned that there was a sound problem. Uh-oh. We had installed a new sound card fairly recently (and the reason is the topic of another rant), which was infamous for having bad support.
The user demonstrated the problem, and I did a little thinking. Audio played on the computer worked fine, but audio in web video was horribly distorted into booming sounds (as if it was way too slow), and squeaking sounds (as if it was way too fast). That led me to suspect Flash, the program that plays most of those videos, as the culprit. So, first thing we tried (after rebooting and using a different browser, of course) was to reinstall Flash. That was easy, but the problem was just as bad as ever. We did a load of googling and came up with nothing. (At this point, I realized that two people less technical than us might have given up.) We tried installing several drivers and packages that other people said worked, but they refused to install because they "couldn't find a product installed", or simply crashed. (The driver is software needed to control a hardware device, and possibly the problem here.) We tried installing the driver found on the CD that had shipped with it, but it blue-screened. Then I had to leave and promised to come back as soon as possible.

While I was gone, I considered switching out the sound card to see if it was the problem, but when I came back, the user had another idea. After visiting the Rocketfish website (the people who made the sound card), he had found a driver listed as compatible with Windows 7. This wouldn't have been odd except for the fact that when we had looked two days before, there had not been any drivers or support or even a mention of the product on the website. We downloaded and installed it, and, wonder of all wonders, it worked.

A week later (knock on wood), there have been no more problems. But if someone thinks a novice user is capable of doing something like that unassisted, I want to talk to them. Naturally, that will only happen on a small percentage of installations, but if it does and you have nobody to help you, you're in a major jam.

--
Soren "scorchgeek" Bjornstad
http://www.thetechnicalgeekery.com

Microsoft is not the answer.
Microsoft is the question.
The answer is "No."