Anand’s blog

About a month ago, I installed a WiFi security patch from Intel on my laptop. The wireless adapter stopped working ever since then. No amount of uninstalls, reinstalls and registry cleanups could get it to start working again. Thanks Intel, that makes my wireless totally secure. No connection = no viruses or hackers. Brilliant.

I’ve been on a wired connection ever since then. Unfortunately not having learnt my lesson last time, last night I installed a driver update for my wired ethernet card. That stopped working too ( I am typing this from another computer). That update was supposed to fix my slow upload speeds. It screwed my connection altogether.

So now both my wired and wireless connections are dead. So, I called Dell customer support. Luckily the customer rep on the other end was good. He suggested a few things, but that didnt help. Finally after running the Dell diagnostic utility I found that the hardware to be in working condition. Its the goddamn software (drivers and what not).

What is my recourse? A complete windows install. Before you guys start suggesting the Windows Repair Utility, let me tell you I tried that too. I booted off my legitimate Windows XP CD, selected the Repair option. It left me at a C:\WINDOWS\> prompt. WTF?, where is the Microsoft UI when you need it? I even tried the Windows Restore, but it couldn’t restore.

Why cant all these things just work right? Its been so many years, its hard to believe that we still have these basic issues such as drivers causing hardware to stop work, and then not being to recover or rollback your changes.

Doesn’t this suck! Now I have to somehow take a backup of all data I have accumulated since I bought this laptop, re-install windows. Apply the gazillion security patches from MS. Download all the software and utilities. Put the data back. A magnanimous waste of time.
Man, if someone gets this web based OS thing going reliably, I’ll be the first guy to buy an account on it.