For your Health, burry XP
October 19, 2010
OK, it’s time to do a rant. Something that needs to be said, but no one has said it that I know of. Finding drivers for XP should be considered capital torture. I understand the need for filling market niches. So there are thousands of companies who have started up and who have fallen in the computer industry. Taking a Microsoft stance of ‘put out the product and fix it later’ mentality. This has destroyed many businesses whose hardware, while unsupported, may still working. The years of XP operating is the longest of any running operating system to date. That is from 2001 to 2014. XP should have been long dead. It is past due. The ancient security systems only take about two minutes to go from functioning to total failure after plugging it into the Internet when unprotected.
Why is XP still around? Because of something called the ‘netbook.’ When they first came out they were tiny computers with a lot of potential. Designers from HP, Acer and Dell jumped onto these little guys. However, they shot themselves in the foot. Or rather they shot at Linux. They took a great OS and snipped it away until it was little more than a glorified browser. People were not impressed and they demanded more. Microsoft jumped on and lo, XP will be around for some time longer. A point I will make later.
XP is around and kicking, but its greatest flaw is the way it’s managing drivers. In 2001 the internet wasn’t a required thing and mainstream wasn’t on the bandwagon yet. They were still climbing on at that time. So drivers were included by the manufacture via CD’s. Not a big deal right? Well unless you’re super organized to the point where you have your underwear spread out from how much color is faded on them, you have lost the drivers and manual. The exception is that you’re a packrat, and cannot find it anyways.
Needless to say, today the only place to find them is in the furthest reaches of the worst humanity has to offer, the Internet. Now back in 2002 through 2006 it was easy to find drivers. You just had to type the name of the thing you were looking in a search engine and put in ‘driver’ at the end of it. You found exactly what you were looking for. Around 2006 you had to put ‘driver download’ to get what you were trying to locate.
Things are totally different now. Remember those market niches? Here’s where they not only haunt you, they cause you to lose faith in your humanity and question your sanity. All of those tricks to look up drivers are taken up. They use those to flood the Internet with their garbage they call a product. Some lowlife trying to impress his own teenaged kids has spent the time to put every single driver search to forward to a ‘paid driver service.’ Any attempt to put download or driver in the search engine spits out pages of useless pay to download services. Do these actually work? Just pray to your unknown god that you didn’t waste your money on a scam. These pages fool you into downloading what you think is your driver, but really only a download program. Do how do you really find drivers these days?
In 2010, here’s how the process goes. You have a driver, and your customer or friend has a computer that crashed. Some poor sap built it, and you somehow were suckered into fixing it. After installing windows and doing extensive data recovery, which is the easy part. Your task is to get the sound, graphics and everything else working. This software to do this is called a ‘driver’. In my previous blog I showed how to use old drivers. In this case you have to search the Internet.
You start by searching the company’s website. However, it’d be easier to drive 3,000 miles to the company head quarters, take hostages and demand software drivers from the SWAT. Yes, corporate WebPages’ are that bad. How often to you go to Sony.com to look at some useful information? Never! It’s called Google. The company is so big, it’s now a verb, you ‘Google’ something and like magic, the Internet pigeons deliver content. Now finding the driver is just finding the right phrase to look for. If you describe your problem, you get pages full of forums where teenagers or likely just as intelligent adults try to solve a problem they know little about. Just pray you find something useful. This will be useful 8% of the time.
But it’s XP, people love XP, people want to worship XP. If you don’t want to change, move to the country and become Amish. They would appreciate your lack of a want for change.
