Self-Service Pain

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It’s extremely easy to cause yourself a lot of pain while performing maintenance on your computer. Here are two sure-fire steps:

1. Do something really stupid, while being aware that you are doing so!
2. Compound the error by being macho, and wanting to fix it manually!

Voila! You will have no one to blame but yourself for your pain, and you can be proud enough of the time wasted to waste a little more by publicly flogging yourself in a blog (like, say, this one…).

Here’s what I did to myself this morning…

Yesterday was Patch Tuesday at Microsoft. When I booted up this moring, Windows informed me that there were four critical updates available, and two optional ones. I looked over the list and was happy to accept the four critical updates.

Of the two optional ones, one was for my LAN device (which I’ve successfully updated in the past, so I was happy to include that). The other was for an external tablet device that I don’t own, and will likely never own. So, why did I check to include it? Only because I thought it might be more efficient to have the updated driver (dormant) on my system, than to hide it from future updates, but make Windows notice each time that it was out-of-date.

Oh oh, first big dumb mistake. When I restarted the computer, installing that driver triggered Vista to think that I now had a Tablet device, and it automatically turned on Tablet PC mode. In itself, that wouldn’t be so bad, except that it disabled my touchpad, which is my only mouse. 🙁

Other than resizing and moving windows around, Windows (XP and Vista) are suprisingly easy to navigate around with only a keyboard, even without Accessibility settings turned on.

I could have undone the Windows Update quickly and painlessly, through the keyboard. But no, I’m macho and need to figure out how to fix this on my own. I launched a browser, searched Google, and found out how to turn off Tablet PC mode. That worked (Tablet PC mode was off) but my touchpad was still dead, even after a reboot.

I found an updated Synaptics Touchpad driver for Windows Vista x64, downloaded and installed it, but it failed to load properly after the reboot.

After dorking around way too much (nearly 90 minutes!), completely mouseless, I finally broke down and did what I should have done in the first place. I pulled up the System Restore facility, selected a restore point from this morning and let it do its magic.

After rebooting, everything was exactly the way it was before I updated the system. I then reapplied the four critical updates plus the networking one. I hid the Tablet (IdeaCOMM) update forever, and all is back to normal and wonderful.

To summarize:

Don’t install optional updates for hardware you don’t own!

If you make any mistake after an update, roll it back immediately!

Lessons to live by. 🙂