Screwed Drivers

I think I figured out why that Windows machine kept freezing at the "33 minutes remaining" mark. I can't tell you the precise reason, but I had suspected, given that this system was in an out of the way location, had Internet access, and was located in the midst of major part-timer foot traffic, that there was probably a good bit of malware of various kinds screwing up the operating system's normal, expected behavior.

I ran across three trojans just rsyncing data from D:\ to C:\backup.

So I did what I should have done on Wednesday: I backed up the data, repartitioned the hard disk, and then reinstalled Windows. It now has a comfy compliment of antivirus software and a non-Administrator user account. The guy who uses the machine doesn't appear to be in today, so I'll break the bad news to him on Monday about his idea to store important files in the Recycle Bin.

But all of this has me thinking about drivers. Windows XP is pretty decent about being able to autodetect common hardware, and I was happy that even though XP shrugged its shoulders at the integrated video card in this Dell box, it could at least give me enough VGA emulation to get better drivers from support.dell.com. God bless USB thumb drives!

Still, XP couldn't figure out the network card, the onboard audio card, the PCI modem, or the integrated video. I ended up unzipping a lot more drivers than I needed just so I could point the Windows Device Manager at C:\Dell\Drivers\R83727 and ask it "Does this look familiar? Enh? Enh?"

It was very easy to bootstrap the process: install the video driver to make things look pretty, install the network driver to get myself online. From there, I could download any other driver I needed, and I'm so glad that, unlike just a couple of years ago, I did not have to strip the machine down to its components and go Googling for product IDs and chip manufacturers to try to figure out what the internals of this system were.

A lot of people knock OEMs like Dell for mass-producing low-quality equipment. I just know that their online driver database is a life-saver. Just enter your service tag and it will tell you what it most likely inside your case. I would pay for that kind of convenience. Perhaps I already have.