A Shovel to the face would’ve been preferred…

Once again, I have been subjected to a rather violent bout of computer trouble, this time it was my WLAN driver.

I can almost guarantee that this will turn into some kind of rant about Windows Update, or HP being dumb and awesome at the same time considering that the source of my problem started with Windows update.

Last night around Eleven O’clock I had just updated my iPod touch to version 3.0, but that’s another post. After installing the update, I decided for the heck of it to check out my Windows Update to see if there was anything of interest, sure enough, there were two optional updates available.

One of the updates was for my Nvidia Chipset, I already knew that there was something wrong with this update considering I tried to install it before and it was corrupt, so I stayed away from that. The second one was for my internal Modem, I decided to install it, just on a whim. Why not, right? The shovel I mentioned above would've come in handy right about this point in the story.

Needless to say, no Rutila Ex Machina stopped me from having a terrible night and morning trying to get my WLAN to function again.

When I restarted my computer after installing the update, I realized that my HP Wireless Assistant only recognized my Bluetooth and my little network icon in the system tray had a friendly red X superimposed onto it. Dang it, you got me again Windows Update, you and your zany Devil updates.

I go into the device manager and I notice that not only is the WLAN driver not functioning, the hardware isn’t even listed, it’s gone.

So I used the trusty Eee pc sitting beside me to go to my computer’s software and drivers page on HP’s site and downloaded the previous version of the Modem driver that had been updated, installed it and it did nothing.

Ok, that’s cool, that’s fine, this ain’t my first time to the rodeo. I then decided to download the driver for my WLAN, I had all confidence that this would fix the problem considering that it’s for the component that was missing. Ok yeah, that didn’t do anything. This just got real.

I then decided to go for my old fallback, System Restore. You remember how I used that back in my previous post right? Yeah, man, that should do the trick. I do that, pick the date and start it up. My laptop boots back up aaand nothing, the problem still exists.

What? You’re kidding. I did it again, to a later date, nothing. I uninstalled the modem and refreshed the device manager, the modem reinstalled itself but the WLAN was as elusive as it ever was.

I’m not entirely sure what went on last night after that considering that I was blind with rage, all I know is that I woke up today in my bed and I smelled like something I shouldn’t smell like (I’ll let your minds do the walking).

When I went to work today I took a different approach. Just kidding, I did another system restore, it did nothing. I then tried something different, I used my HP Recovery Manager to restore the original driver for my WLAN. I was fairly confident that that would work. Once again I was met with nothing in the form of Wi-Fi. Needless to say, I was very frustrated and defeated, there was never a computer problem I couldn’t fix.

I decided to take another approach, I uninstalled the Modem and installed the WLAN driver, something interesting then happened. The modem was all of a sudden recognized and installed. What? Why is the Modem installing when I’m installing the WLAN driver? That’s when I had an idea.

I uninstalled the Modem again, as well as the Broadcom WLAN driver and then I installed the WLAN driver through the Recovery Manager, once again, while the Recovery Manager installed the driver, the Modem was recognized and installed, I couldn’t do anything about it since it was automatically going to restart a few seconds afterwards.

Ugh, I was pretty defeated, the Modem was installed again, and the WLAN was still not recognized. I was even considering sending it to a “Professional,” but then I saw the device manager in my system tray, it was installing the Wireless network!

So needless to say, I am relieved and happy to have my laptop working again at full throttle. One good thing did come out of all of this though, I had enough material to write a new blog post.

UPDATE: Just turned it on after shutting it down last night before going to sleep, I guess that wasn't a permanent fix. So, in short: brb depression.