Y ouire going to love this one. Apple Hot News point to and eWeek article titled For Plug-and-Play, I Pick the Apple that deals with Peter Coffeeis (the author) trials and tribulations while attempting to connected a "generic" hard drive and FireWire drive kit to Windows laptops. Mr. Coffee also happen to have a TiBook handy. You can probably guess the rest of the story. From the article.: (This is where Mr. Coffee attempts to connect his drive to a Win2k laptop)
On Windows 2000, I got a cheerful report (but only after double-clicking the obscure taskbar icon for managing plug-and-play hardware) that the 1394 device was working correctly. OK, so where was the Explorer icon for my new drive? Nowhere to be seen.
But kudos go to Tuan, at ADS technical support: Less than 24 hours after I left a hotline message ("Where, oh where has my disk icon gone?"), he called me and talked me through the process of getting Windows 2000 to admit that the disk was there and to put it to work. But it was a journey that most users would find intimidating, involving several layers of navigation through utilities with forbidding names and impeded by insistently helpful wizards. It certainly wasnit what you would call "discoverable."
Then there was Mac OS X, where things just worked the way they should. Period. The contrast was impressive --or depressing, depending on your platform loyalties.
Check out the entire article at eWeek.