Frustrations with Windows

I recently had to re-install Windows and it brought back a lot of frustrated memories.  The re-install frustrated me so much, I decided to blog about it.

The first thing the frustrated me was how quickly Windows hides some error messages.  I was only partially paying attention to the restart when I noticed that it restarted a second time, this time into recovery mode.  I rebooted it again and noticed that a blue screen occurred.  Before I had a change to read anything, it rebooted automatically.  Instead of letting my know what the problem is, it decided that it was much more user friendly to reboot into recovery mode.

Frustration two came about due to recovery mode.  It was pretty useless in this situation.  It would sit there for a few minutes, then tell me it could not fix the problem.  It said the problem probably occurred because of a hardware change.  It didn't tell me what hardware was causing the problem.  Just that I should "undo" the hardware change that I made.  In my situation (going from virtual to physical hardware), I can't just "undo" the change.

Frustration three is related to network drivers.  I'm not talking about wireless drivers.  I am talking about a Realtek Gigabit Ethernet controller.  This particular install didn't need the drivers, but my next one might.  The main reason I am "allowing" a physical Windows install is because Windows 7 Pro supports network backup/restore functionality.  In theory, you can pop in the Windows 7 Pro install cd and restore from a previous snapshot.  This is very similar to the Qemu qcow2 snapshotting feature.  If the entire harddisk dies for some reason, I can restore from a snapshot.  That is where the lack of network drivers comes in.  The install cd won't work the way I want it to since it won't be able to access the network share.