I am going to spend my night removing my foot from the following people's asses;
So, I get a copy of WinXP from an IRC aquaintance a few days ago. He had been using it for more than two weeks, with no complications. I decided to give it the old college try, so I burned my backups, and went boldly where few had ever gone before; WinXP land.
Do not use WinXP for a few weeks, minimum.
So I am cruising right along, install goes smoothly, and bam! I have WinXP desktop on my screen.
This is where my problems begin.
My internet connection is DSL provided by Earthlink. The two computers in my house are connected thought a router; my dad's with ethernet, and mine goes back to the phone line, up to my room, and to a "phone line to USB connector". It worked wonderfully under WinME, and I hoped the same for XP. Sadly, this was not the case. By installing the driver for the Phone to USB bastard, I had begun my slow demise into the land of tedium. I tried to open a webpage via Microsoft Explorer, and the compuer reboots itself, no warning, just a sudden powerdown. There is no end in sight. The only network related thing that will run is a ping -t www.webpage.com command. besides that, I get to listen to brian eno's new windows startup masterpiece as many times as I could possibly want to.
So after a few tinkerings around of my setup by a few friends of mine as well as yours truly, and I start calling tech-help lines. Dell; no new drivers. Microsoft; no new drivers. 2wire (producer of the USB dongle); no new drivers. earthlink; no freaking clue.
I have an unusable desktop, and a very real temptation to slip into a percussive maintanance binge. All the people I have talked to about it that should know what to do haven't heard anything about WinXP yet, and it just makes it very clear to me that what companies should be responsible for, and what they can take care of are two completely different things.
/me sighs, installs Windows 98