Tale of two distros

My friend has XP Home on a laptop, and uses AOL dial-up. We meet at a coffee shop with free wi-fi. She's "not technical" and dissatisfied with the setup and we're looking at options. The laptop is just old enough that it doesn't have builtin wi-fi.

Last week I showed her Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS. We plugged in my "Orinoco Silver" (Lucent) 802.11b card and tried Firefox and Openoffice.org 2. Everything just works.

This week I thought I'd do something *easier*. We'll install Mozilla Thunderbird on her MSFT distro, factory configured by Compaq. I made her a POP3 account on one of my servers and sent it mail. I looked up the Orinoco card and XP comes with a driver. I put Thunderbird for Windoze on my USB thumb drive (just in case) and headed over there. Windoze recognized the USB drive and we copied the Thunderbird installer to the desktop and ran it. No big deal.

Insert wi-fi card. After *two minutes* of disk activity, Windoze pops up announcing it sees "new hardware" and wants to run a "Wizard." The "Wizard" goes through several straightforward dialogs and declares success, but then requires the machine be rebooted! Why? Aren't these drivers runtime loadable modules? Why can't I just load a module and use it, like I can on DR-DOS, Solaris, Mac OS, and Linux?

After the reboot, Windoze sees the card but announces the "network is unavailable." So now I want to run iwconfig and find out why. (Other laptops in the room are on the net, including mine running Debian Etch with the same wi-fi card.) I want to look at the kernel message log. Where are the kernel messages on XP? Broken driver, and you can't do anything about it.

My friend suggests we dump Windoze first and switch ISPs later. She's right. No sense trying to debug Microsoft's broken distro when we're about to retire it.