A couple of weeks ago I had to do a trip to Singapore.
Whilst there I decided to buy another Laptop. A Fujitsu 6120 Lifebook this time.
It’s a nice machine – Core Duo Processor, 3GB memory, big hard drive and all the
extras that you come to expect these days.
And of course Vista.
I didn’t expect much of Vista, and I sure as hell wasn’t disappointed.
One of my first jobs on getting home was to upgrade to Windows 2000.
Why not XP, you might be wondering.
Well, to my mind, XP was designed for managers, accountants and 15 year old school girls. Here is a typical day in the life of each:
The Manager
———–
Waddle into the office, scream at the secretary
Send an email to other managers describing his socks and undies
Complain about the spreadsheet that he ordered redone yesterday without saying what’s wrong with it – coz he doesn’t understand it anyway
Look for porn on the internet until lunch time
Play games for the rest of the day
The Accountant
————–
Mince into the office, whimper at the secretary
Send an email describing his socks and undies and state of his bottom to other accountants
Send an email complementing the manager on his choice of socks and undies
Whine at the secretary to redo the spreadsheet that the manager is complaining about, because the accountant doesn’t understand it either – despite creating it in the first place.
Look for porn on the internet until lunch time
Play games for the rest of the day
The 15 year old schoolgirl
————————–
Prance off to wherever the hell she is going (she hasn’t a clue)
Send an email to friends describing socks, undies and current breast development
Update her blog with tales of butterflies and fantasies of being gang raped on the way home
Play games for the rest of the day
For these people, XP is the perfect choice.
AN OS for the unthinking public.
Considering all that, Vista makes a lot of sense. You see time moves on:
The Manager has destroyed the company he was supposedly working for, taken the big payout and moved on to destroy another one.
The accountant has a new boyfriend.
The 15 year old schoolgirl is now 19 with 3 sprogs from 3 different fathers.
And what is their OS of choice?
Vista of course! It suits them down to the ground. Another OS for the unthinking Public.
An OS for people who don’t want to do anything useful. An OS that prevents them from doing anything useful. An OS for useless people!
I won’t be part of it, that’s why I have stuck with Windows 2000 and will continue to do so. When it is no longer viable, I will switch to Linux. Or perhaps something else will be along by then. Maybe, just maybe Microsoft will wake up and create a decent OS. But sadly, I think that might be asking just a little too much.
Anyway, back to the subject itself.
If anyone else is contemplating upgrading
Vista to Windows 2000 on a 6120, it is not too difficult.
Most of the drivers are available from Fujitsu:
http://support.ts.fujitsu.com/IndexDownload.asp?lng=en&SoftwareGUID=
http://www.fujitsu.com/global/support/products/computing/servers/primergy/drivers/legal-windows.html
I had a bit of a problem with the LAN driver, a better one is available from:
http://www.marvell.com/support.html
They are all listed as XP drivers, but they work OK with 2000.
Download all of them, unzip them and write them to a CD – you will need it later.
The first thing you need to do is add the SATA drivers to your install CD.
Use nLite to do this. nLite is available from:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancements/nLite.shtml
And a write up on how to use it is here:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Install-Windows-XP-On-SATA-Without-a-Floppy-F6-47807.shtml
Once you have an installation CD with the SATA drivers, just install Windows as normal.
You can then install the rest of the drivers.
The sequence I used for installation was (not that it should make much difference):
Chipset drivers
General IO
Video Drivers
O2 Reader drives (This is the SD card slot)
Touch Pad
Audio – this will install the modem also. Make sure you let it finish, it will ask for extra driver files during installation. Let it look on the driver disk that you made earlier.
Wireless Drivers – there is a message that DPinst32 fails, but that can be ignored
Bluetooth drivers (switch it on first) and as with the Audio, make sure you let it finish completely before rebooting. It can look like it has finished, but it is still installing. Just give it a minute longer.
Fingerprint Reader Drivers
LAN Driver – this is a manual install from device manager
Hotkey Utility
Touch Button Utility
System Extensions Utility
You will then see a couple of unknown devices listed in device manager.
Just do the reinstall driver bit and allow it to search the driver CD.
After that, upgrade Internet Explorer to Version 6 SP1, do the Windows updates – there are over 60 of them, and then there are updates to the updates, so this takes a while – you will need an ADSL line unless you have a recent copy of Autopatcher:
You can then install the wireless applications and you are done.
The only thing I didn’t get working was the built in web camera.
I have contacted Fujitsu on this but so far it has not been resolved.
The system is stable and quite responsive under Windows 2000, and much nicer to use than the horror of Vista.