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a bit off topic but, i checked out a friends laptop who had thought it was no good any more,and had done a fairly good job of destroying the hard drive. as i recall it was an acer,any way i took the hard drive out of my old vaio and put it in to check it,i could not stop laughing as it fired into life showing a big ubuntu screen so i let it run,expecting an explosion any second. to my surprise it went straight in and found the wireless drivers and works great.It's because ubuntu (and alot of other distros) include as many drivers as they can to maximise compatibility. It makes for a bigger kernel and maybe a load of services you don't really need but for alot of people "just works" ranks higher than "is fast".can any one explain why or was i just lucky. alex the not so noob
You can do the same thing with windows (2k and xp at least) if you have the drivers for the new hardware installed. During my 3rd year group project at uni, the computer (supplied by one of the guys in our group) that was controlling our project died on the day of the demonstration. We scrounged from the lab the only computer with 2 serial ports, plugged in the harddrive and it booted up fine and we demonstrated our project. Admittedly, this is rare: possibly a once in a lifetime experience.
Also, you can use vmware to boot your native windows installation and switch between booting it in a vm and natively. You have to use hardware profiles so you don't have to keep rebooting when it "finds new hardware", but with some preparation and effort it's possible and quite usable.
I think that the main thing in either case is to have the harddrive controller drivers. Then at least you can boot and sort out any missing drivers.
Assuming the drivers are on there, the diffence is that linux will just work but windows will tell you it's finding new hardware, ask you to reactivate and tell you to reboot.
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