For the most part, I view computers as I do cars: They are tools to help you get to your [computational/geographic] destination. A little luxury is always a good thing, but I don’t get religious about it – “Must have radial tires!” “Must be a Mac” or whatever.

I have my biases, but – overall – I don’t care. I just want the thing (car/computer) to work, to do what it is meant to do, in whatever fashion.

The issue for me is when the car/computer fails: Auuggghhh!

Yesterday, Microsoft released a series of patches that were good things – security and all that. I installed same late at night, after full night of coding, as I knew it would (probably) take a restart to make them take effect.

Did so, and my damn mouse died. (Logitech MX700) It was too late to rummage around to find the driver disk for the mouse (others sleeping…), so I Googled it and found only a driver for an older (500 MX) model. Given the Net, I probably could have found the correct driver, but it was late…

Installed, restarted and the mouse awoke, except for the page forward/page back buttons – that I’ve grown to love.

[bleep]!

This evening, I dug out the driver disk and installed, and all is good.

Except it wiped out my MusicMatch (MP3 player).

[bleep X 2!!]

Reinstalled MusicMatch from the Dell recovery discs, slew of weird errors; did various updates and several reboots…and now all is good.

It’s good that all is good, but…

I’m fairly savvy with computers; if it took me this long, what about others. Hey, I just installed MS upgrades and now the mouse doesn’t work? Would an average user even know what the hell to do? Or what had happened?

Cars good.

Computers good.

Unless they be busted…and then it’s evil…