Chapter 4. Setup Primer

I’m often surprised at just how little emphasis some people put on the installation of their software. Many people—including me—got the idea somewhere along the way that you should be able to stick a CD-ROM in the drive, type a command (or double-click an icon), and then forget about anything other than waiting for the software to install. For the most part, software installation should work this way, but it doesn’t.

Unlike early versions of Windows where you had to enter settings manually, or even Windows 95, where hardware detection was far from perfect, Windows XP is easy to install. It can detect most types of hardware automatically. In fact, this version does a better job than Windows 9x or Windows NT/2000 in detecting ...

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