My Laptop is a free spirit!

The wireless is, at least.

Turns out that my internal wireless card is not fried. That dude at the Service place just wanted to give up, and it’s always funny to notice that they sound like a broken record when they can’t fix something, it’s always fried, or the motherboard has to be replaced, when it’s something completely different.

The diagnosis for my laptop was that the WLAN was not working simply because the laptop got so hot that it fried my internal wireless card. That made no sense, since it stopped working after a software update.

Anyways, I’ve got my laptop back, and I’ve got a lovely 802.11 N Wi-Fi USB Adapter to plug into my laptop so it can live on with the interwebs a-flowin’ through it.

Here’s where the weird part comes in.

Much like a Ninja, or more so a wild Stallion, my internal wireless card occasionally shows up and functions. The Stallion analogy works better in my opinion. You can’t tame it, if you shut the gate it’ll just jump the fence and you’ll never see it again. If you leave the gate open, it’ll come in for a little fellowship from time to time with it’s fellow internal components. It seems to show up more often now, maybe it’s because it feels a sense of rivalry between the Wi-Fi adapter and itself… I am a little crazy, yes.

In Memoriam...

Before I head off to Camp until next Sunday, I thought I should post that the nice man caring for Lil' Jim has just told me that the internal Wireless card is officially fried. The only way for Lil' Jim to communicate with the outside world is to strap him to life support... or wireless support, or something.

Well, like a good Mother (don't read into that), I shall still care for it no matter how many appendages are broken by it's own Mother (once again, don't read into that), serviced and declared dead.

I'll be grabbin' up a wireless card and continuing on like there's nothing wrong. Though, in the spirit of denial, I shall try one last thing to see if there's life in the card. I'm gonna try and stick in a Linux Live CD and see if it detects it. IT'LL WORK DON'T JUDGE ME AUUUUGH!!!

Yep, I'm an idiot...

I accidentally deleted two of my blog posts last night; "The Speakers! They do Nothing!" and "To Go Where No Man Has Gone Before (Or Wants To Go)..."

Oh, my iPod and I are a crazy pair. If not for Google caching my site, I wouldn't have been able to salvage it.

Also, a minor update on the status of my Laptop, it is now in the hands of professionals. May their hands be guided with laser precision.

UPDATE: The nice man taking care of my beloved Lil' Jim says that he'll have to back up my data and restore the OS, I should have my laptop back by Tuesday.

UPDATE 2: I got my Laptop back today! Now, since he reloaded the OS, I've lost all my programs, configuration settings aaaaand my Wireless still doesn't work. Makes me wonder what would happen if I installed Windows 7 RC1...

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.

The Speakers! They do Nothing!

So yeah, last night I had a spot of computer trouble.

I had just updated iTunes last night and restarted my trusty laptop and found that the start-up sound didn’t play. The login confirmation sound didn’t play, etc… I looked at the sound manager and drivers and it looked like everything was recognized correctly, so I was stumped. I later realized that I did get sound, but only in iTunes and Windows Media Player, odd to say the least. So I tried reinstalling the sound driver, didn’t do anything, mainly because HP didn’t provide the correct driver for my system (I have an HP tx2010 laptop) so that made things worse. I eventually did a system restore and everything was OK.

That was weird to say the least, but it also made sense considering what I had done on my computer earlier that day. I recently switched from Thunderbird to Postbox for viewing my Gmail account, but Postbox didn’t offer the functionality that allowed it to be minimized to the taskbar like Thunderbird (I used the MinimizeToTray add-on). I looked around the Intertubes for a solution, knowing that there are many applications that allow programs to minimize to the tray, picked one and installed it.

During the installation, it notified me that a certain component in the installation might be viewed as a Virus by the system, but it “TOTALLY WAS NOT!” Yup, they put that in Caps in the EULA. Anyways, it didn’t work and I uninstalled it.

My security system, Webroot Spysweeper, started it’s scheduled security sweep and saw a Trojan, this is uncommon. I had it remove it, I didn’t really care considering that it was probably one of the components from the program I uninstalled.

Long story short, I’m not sure if it was the Trojan or iTunes that qualified my Laptop’s sound for a run at the Gelding’s Plate, but if you’re reading this and you have that problem, just do a system restore, it’ll clear it right up.