Three Hours of Windows

Today I installed Windows 2000 on my old 333 to use as a tool to learn about computer security. Things went less than well, as you might be able to imagine. Well, the installation was fine, but getting the system up and running was kind of a drag.

The first thing I did was use my laptop to download the driver for my Linksys wifi card because I knew I'd need it. I copied it to my flash drive and thought that would be that. But of course, Windows 2000 can't open a zip file without an external application. So I put my flash drive back in my laptop, and extracted it. Another thing I immediately noticed was that my Logitech wireless mouse wouldn't work, so I downloaded that while I was at it.

I tried to install the mouse driver, but it required my computer to run Service Pack 4. No problem because I had the wifi driver right there and I attempted to install it. The problem is that it's a poorly written application which needs the mouse because it refuses to respond to keyboard commands. So I stole an old ball mouse from another computer and plugged it in. Of course I needed to reboot to make Windows see it.

Now that I had a working mouse I tried the wifi driver again. This time it complained about running in 16 bit color mode. I looked in the video options and discovered that I needed to install the Geforce driver before I could accomplish anything there (which I knew, but had forgotten). I switched the thumb drive between computers again and downloaded the driver for my Nvidia card. That actually installed alright, but once again, I needed to reboot.

I switched the color depth and installed the wifi driver. After yet another reboot I found that the driver was properly installed and the app was running, but it wouldn't detect my wifi card. I rebooted once more, just to be safe. It was then that I remembered how finicky Windows is about installing a device before it's driver so I uninstalled the linksys card in the Device Manager, rebooted, rebooted again because Windows insisted, and finally got the wifi card running. But of course, it didn't connect to my router. It connected to some random 2wire router that I didn't know existed. A router with a signal of -6% while my router had a signal of 100% and I explicitly told the wifi app to connect to my router.

After sorting that out, Windows refused to recognize that I had an Internet connection. Another reboot fixed that up. I moved on to update.microsoft.com, where I got angrily redirected to a page for Service packs because the Windows Updater can't handle that sort of thing. So I downloaded the 129MB Network installer and went through the lengthy upgrade process. Reboot.

Upon trying to install the mouse driver the second time it insisted that I need Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher. So back to Windows update to find a link that goes to the IE 7 home page. Not quite what I wanted so I had to google it.It installed quickly, but required another reboot and took a while to "configure my control panel" on restating Windows. I went back to Windows Update, but it got stuck on "Searching for Updates" for almost an hour, so I gave up and went back to installing my mouse.

This time it worked, but took about 20 minutes. I rebooted one last time, switched mice and finally after 3 hours (not including Windows Update time), 5 software installations, and 8 reboots, I have a working mouse. Thank God Microsoft makes this so easy.