Bill,

On Fri, 7 Apr 2006 11:04:03 -0700, William "Chops" Westfield wrote:

>...
> "NO drivers available" usually means that there are no drivers
> for the sound chips (which seem to proliferate), or for 3d Video
> acceleration.  Neither of which ought to be necessary for running
> MPLAB :-) 

Sadly in the case of the "Designed for Windows ME" HP machines, it was the motherboard chips that were 
involved, including the disk controller and other rather vital stuff.  (I think the graphics processor too, 
which would do only 80 x 24 text mode, and possibly bog-standard VGA, unless the right driver was loaded).  
And there really were no drivers available - HP were adamant that the machine would run only ME, and nothing 
else - Win2k would not work on those machines (and believe me, we tried!).

It's like these days with USB devices - in theory if everyone follows the rules any USB device should work 
with any operating system, but nowadays a lot of the low-end items like memory-card readers, serial 
interfaces, pen-drives, etc. don't follow the rules - they supply their own driver for Win2k and XP, state 
that these are required, and if you want to use it with other OpSyses you're out of luck.  Personally I feel 
that with the PC industry being 25 years old, it's disgusting that this still happens!

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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