Welcome to Nowhere

I pretty much live on USB. Have for half an age. Kind of a requirement with about 90% of what I do. I have 3 external drives, all of them USB. I have an admitedly not used printer. That’s USB. The keyboard is USB. The mouse, if I’d gotten it back from the former roommate before he started being a tool, is also USB. The new wireless card (more on that below) is USB. Oh and I have an iPhone. that’s USB if anything useful needs to happen. Basicly, USB runs my life. Which is awesome, squared. At least until it decides to stop working. Which brings us to today–well, yesterday now.

I got my hands on a wireless N card a bit over a year ago, since the card this machine came with was trying real hard to head maybe in a that-a-way type direction. When I got the card, the N wireless standard was still fairly new–so new it was still considered experimental. The card did what it was supposed to, for the most part. But recently, especially when doing fairly network intensive things like copying files from one system to the other, I started pushing the card’s limits. And it started pushing back. Dropping connections, sometimes not actually picking the connection back up, and once requiring a restart to actually fix the thing–I’m somewhat blaming windows for that last one. Productivity doesn’t really get to happen if you have to check every so often to make sure your system didn’t drop your productivity on the floor halfway through. So yesterday, since May and I wanted breakfast anyway, we figured we’d bounce off a restaurant and land at Staples. So we did, and I grabbed a USB wireless card. I’m getting a little low on ports, as is she, so we grabbed a couple hubs to go with–nothing fancy, just your basic 4-port jobs. Brought them back home, then figured we’d relax a bit before I started setting things up. It was only gonna take a few minutes, but it didn’t need to get done right away–most of the intensive stuff could wait a couple hours. So I put it off until yesterday afternoon, then decided I’d take the couple minutes I’d need to actually get things set up. It was gonna be quick and easy. Slap the hub in place, slap the card in the hub, install both, go on about my day. Yeah, about that.

The USB hub installed no problem, once I figured out what the hell the extra cable was for. The card? That took a little convincing. Well, and a CD–really, who the hell packs driver software on a CD anymore, D-link? But then the fun popped in and said hi. The instalation of either card or hub, or both, caused one of my external drives to hit the deck. It was recognised, but you couldn’t actually *do* anything with it without getting permission and I/O errors up the wazu. Weirdness squared, since nothing I’d done went anywhere near the drive that gave me the fit. Oh well, you’ll have that. So figuring what was just your typical Windows wonkyness, I hit the restart button. Hey, they aren’t kidding that 90% of problems with Windows can be solved, at least temporarily, by a restart. This one slid itself neatly into the 10% that couldn’t.

I brought the machine back up, went to call up the problem drive. “Windows can’t find l:”. Wait wait what? Oh no you didn’t. “My Computer” tells me nope, that drive ain’t showing up. Different letter, maybe? Windows develops amnesia sometimes. Nope, that doesn’t do it either. Alright, let’s drop into device manager and see what ate itself. Oh, well that’s cool. Where my external drive should be, there’s an “Unknown Device” staring at me instead. Oh and hey look. Uninstalling it and reinstalling it? Still an unknown device. And Windows ever so helpfully informs me that a USB device attached to this computer has malfunctioned and could not be recognised. Where’s my vodka, again?

I fought with that for several hours. Then, when I thought the system might be in the process of unscrewing itself–it was taking longer than usual to restart, which it usually does if it’s attempting to self-correct, I took the opportunity to throw myself into bed for a couple hours and allow my brain to recover from its partially liquified state. Should not have done that, for the system, it done fooled me. It came up just fine. I could, again, sort of see that there was a device there. But it was still an unknown device. Well hey. It’s something, just not what I’d call progress. So, alright, whichever. USB sometimes has its preferences. That’s fine.

I’d shuffled things around in the back of the machine so I’d have room to put the hub without killing me, and that required shuffling the drive over a port. That could have possibly screwed things up. Okay, we can fix that. Yank the hub, stick it in one of the vacant ports in the front of the machine. Move the drive back to where it used to be. Hey look–I have a drive again. We’re in the clear, finally. That only took far too long. So I started to set things up the way I had them before. That meant queuing up the several downloads I have going in the background. So I did that. “This drive has been removed. Please reattach the drive.” Oh really.

turns out, universal plug and play means you must reorganize everything, if you’re going to reorganize anything–clearly, this is what they meant by “play”. That’s what my computer was trying to tell me, when it decided this time I didn’t have a j: drive. I most certainly do have a j: drive, but my fixing of the l: problem made everything go pair shaped. Oh, and Windows decided I didn’t have an SD card reader either–fair enough, since I never used the thing anyway. Like the first drive did before, both of these showed up as unknown devices when looking. Well, hell. I didn’t want sleep anyway. I did want caffeine, though. And vodka. Definitely vodka. So it was do this dance again and see what turns up. Exactly how I invisioned spending my first 24 hours with new hardware.

Once again, into device manager. Once again, play the uninstall reinstall game. For the sake of the card reader, it was also hit up Dell’s website for drivers, just in case a simple reinstall fixes its wagon–it didn’t. Well bloody hell. And the drive in question didn’t move once during the entire arangement of getting everything else to work. Windows just decided it wasn’t gonna play. Oh, and it was *that* drive’s turn to have malfunctioned and not be recognised. this is getting hella old, Microsoft.

Again, do the poking around, figure out where it’s brokoen. Again, curse when the thing that’s broken won’t fix when you shove it into place. So, I did the next best thing. I pulled *that* drive out of the port it had been sitting in since that drive existed, and slapped it into the USB hub alongside the wireless card. And didn’t the damn thing spin up, be recognised and do anything I damn well please like it’d spent its entire life exactly like that. “Show you what’s in your downloads directory? Sure. Here you go.” “Hold very still while your torrent client re-checks every single goddamn file I have because my disappearance threw it for a loop? Whatever you say, boss.” Yeah, screw you, ya something something something.

So now I have 3 working USB drives again. Plus the working USB hub and wireless card I wanted to have in the first damn place. Still don’t have a working SD card reader, but I’ll worry about that if and when I need to. I’ll probably do a system restore at some point if only to see if that puts it in a position to maybe self-correct and undo the mass confusion, but as for right now? The damn thing works, I’m braindead, and I think there’s a sub or two calling my name. Oh, and the next time somebody tells me USB is extremely easy to work with, I won’t be held responsible for any pain caused to any USB stick regions.