Today I had an oportunity to install this so well regarder Window 7. I admit I didn't expect things to go as smothly as with Fedora 16 I recently installed on my new laptop. However, the actual result was below my expectations.
When installing Fedora 16 I had only two issues. First, I had to do it all in English, because Lithuanian is not yet supported by Anaconda installer. This was easily resolved the first time I booted it - I just switched to Lithuanian, logged out and back in. The second issue was wireless, that didn't work. In this case I had to connect the cable and hopefully it began to work after I installed updates (the newer kernel had the required driver). That's it!
With Windows the story is not that short.
The good thing was, that Lithuanian language is supported by the installer. The bad news is the quality of it. No surprise many people (mostly skilled computer users) refuse to use it - it clearly took me time to understand, what do certain terms mean.
The installer presented two installation options: upgrade for previous and advanced one. The description of first one was such, that I had no idea, whether it's suitable for fresh install or not (probably yes, but the description talked ONLY about update). I chose the advanced one. Then, as in good old days, I had to manually create partitions (or I missed the "auto" button in the UI somewhere...). Hopefully installer allocated 100 MB for system needs automatically.
The installation progress was sort of funny: half of time was spend on "extracting files" option at 0%. So much for Windows niceness to show progress on what it's doing :)
Entering the Windows activation code is no fun to me...
I admit the installation was faster than I expected. What I also didn't expect was that screen size won't be detected automatically. It apears, that Microsoft still thinks that 800x600 is a good default.
What surprised me the most was Windows failure to make a use of a network card. Like in bad old days, I had to insert a motherboard disk and install drivers, to make it work.
Now with system up and running, the manual software installations saga begins (oh, glorious "next" button a hundred times and those slow installation dialogs for every little pease of software). And another one afterwards of keeping it up to date (upgrading each of them separately), hopefully this is no longer up to me.
