Blame Microsoft for it
By Dave Dekker - Posted on July 19th, 2007
Tagged: Windows
So I get about 20 text messages from Dan about Windows sucking.. blah blah blah... So I asked a few questions and got so interesting answers back... What are you doing? He was setting up a wireless adapter on a Windows XP machine, Normally this is a pretty easy task (my roommate just did it at his girls and it took all of 30 seconds) well Dan was crying about it not being plug-n-play, well this is pretty much up to the Hardware maker to have supplied the drivers to MS or have at least developed a decent driver/installer; its not Microsofts job to write drivers for every piece of hardware. Come to find out it was some off brand thing that there is no way that Windows XP would have drivers for, I told him to plug that same adapter into his Apple and make it work; no reply... because there is just no way to make it work... lets just say that it is crappy hardware no matter what OS you use.
I must be blessed or something, pretty much every piece of hardware I buy plugs in and either works right off the bat, or with a simple driver install and all is well, I bought a few different pieces of hardware for my apple and no joy (a skype phone adapter, a GPS usb antenna). I can't blame Apple too much for this, but at the same time I wanted a skype phone adapter that worked and there isn't one... I even bought one for Dan to get going, he just berried it in the back yard so he didn't have to deal with me ripping on him about it not working...
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I did have an issue with getting not one, but two wireless routers working with Windows. Is it because these routers were not compatible or did not have drivers? Nope. These came from Best Buy and they were Windows compatible. So they were supposed to work. Now is it bad drivers? I think not... because if they were, then Best Buy would not have them on the shelves as the return rate would be too high. So they must work.
Windows XP bragged about being Plug and Play, not the hardware makers. My problem went deeper. The installers did not seem to work. Dave did say try it with my mac, but I couldn't, as I did not have it with me. But... I did have my iPhone and the second router worked on that....but not on the Windows laptop. So Apple worked and Windows didn't.
The main issue I had with it is that each router had a different interface to get to it. The Buffalo Router was not recognized by the Windows software. I had to use the Buffalo software. It's a wireless router, not a card! Why do I have to use there software? Now in the tray, I had two wireless applications running, one for Windows, which did not work, and one for Buffalo, which did recognize the router, but we could not get on the internet. The second router I tried was a Belkin. The Microsoft Windows OS did recognize this, so this was good. Now I only had one Wireless application running in the tray.
So what was it? I am not sure. The Buffalo we never did get to work, while the Belkin I had to set it up through the browser. The Belkin router was working on my iPhone with no problem, while the Windows did not. It found the router, but not the internet. I changed the security to WEP from WPA and everything worked. My guess is the WIndows Laptop was not able to use WPA.
So the question is how can a general consumer get this to work? They couldn't. I could not imagine my sister(s) going through this. There was no feedback on what was wrong so I just started trying stuff and I eventually figured out that it was the security.
Can I blame Windows for this? I can and I did, and I will again. It should be not this difficult.
And yes.. you can't blame Apple for the skype thing too much, in fact, you can't blame them at all. Is it Apple's job to write the drivers for Skype? I think not. :)