A relative’s Dell XPS 8000 recently suffered a hard drive failure and had to be restored from backup onto a new drive. Naturally, it could no longer connect to the Internet.

Problem 1: The machine’s BIOS no longer recognized any USB keyboard that Dell didn’t create, and so wouldn’t boot with my keyboard in order to fix the problem. I had to borrow a Dell keyboard.

Problem 2: Windows did not have valid drivers for either the wireless or wired network cards. Dell distributes the drivers via its website, but without already having the drivers it’s impossible to connect to the Internet. I had to download them from my iMac, burn a DVD, and load them from DVD on the PC.

Problem 3: When given the “Service Tag” for this machine, supposedly identifying the specific machine so Dell can provide the correct drivers, Dell provides 64 bit drivers which are completely incompatible with the 32 bit processor. This one was a doozy. I had to ask Google to find every possible driver for any model Broadcom NIC and then try them all until one worked.

Just for a little comparison, my own iMac suffered a hard drive failure last year. Apple installed a new drive, I restored from Time Machine, and it was like nothing had ever happened.

I don’t mean to insight a religious Mac vs. PC debate, and in fact Apple does plenty of stuff I dislike, but that much effort to connect to the Internet (via a wired connection, no less) is just ridiculous.