Those Cocky Developers!

What is it about software developers eh? They think that just because they write software for a living (or in my case, fix bugs!) that they know everything there is to know about computers. Do you think they read manuals? Nope. Do they use the CD's that come shipped with their computers? Nope. They just try to fix things by themselves - 'cos that's what they're supposed to be good at.

Thursday night I switched on my PC and within a minute or so of booting it just froze. Odd I thought. So I rebooted and it did the same thing again. It continued to do this and I didn't find a solution to it. Most of Thursday night and all of yesterday afternoon and evening was spent trying to fix it. I went to the Major Geeks forums and followed the instructions in there for removing malware. I did find some extra stuff but it didn't fix the problem. I double checked all my hardware, I fiddled with my router a lot. Nothing worked.

After some hours I reluctantly phoned my broadband provider for help. After walking me through his little checklist of mindlessly pointless things that I had already tried he asked his supervisor for help who told him to tell me that only one PC would be supported and they could therefore offer me no more help as another two computers on our network were working fine.

So, time for a reinstall. I spent ages copying some crap that always gets installed to your C drive (like save games for Oblivion & GTA - how irritating), and I carefully made a list of all the stuff I'd need to reinstall. I reinstalled Windows - still didn't work. This flummoxed me because usually XP is pretty good at just figuring out our network all by itself without me having to fiddle with it too much.

After many many hours of frustration I decided to have a little dig into my Alienware pack that had come with the PC. I realised that I'd installed an old version of XP so I reinstalled all over again using the Alienware version. This was better because at least it came with SP2. But the network was still buggered. Then I found another CD called "Master CD". I wonder what that is I thought to myself.

I plopped it in the drive, found a folder called Drivers and in that, a folder called Network. Hmmm. There was a readme in there that said that the network drivers were installed with the NForce drivers. These NForce drivers were found under Motherboard so I tried installing that. It installed an Ethernet controller and suddenly new hardware was found and installed, I had a LAN and an IP Address. I loaded up a browser and bingo - it all worked!

Now if only I had tried that first...

Moral of the story : check the stuff the manufacturer sends you!