God-damn it, effing bloody Windows has done it again. I was running the normal weekly Update and it asked me whether it should update my video card driver, and I foolishly said yes. Two hours later, I am back to having a working desktop after a very frustrating time of VGA madness.

You would think I would know better than to let Windows update a perfectly working video card driver, especially when the card is old and the drivers haven't changed for several years, and especially when it is Windows XP. Yet, stupidly, I did. My excuse is that I had been fiddling around with disabling and then re-enabling some hardware drivers for my two audio cards in an attempt to get them to play nicely together (which they eventually did, I am happy to say). This update was the first one since, so I suppose I assumed that I had inadvertently triggered some update mechanism in the video card driver too.

Windows said the current driver was old and would I like to update to a Microsoft current one? Yes. Update goes ahead, reboot, and...nothing but VGA. Yikes! Little did I know I would now be in for a two hour saga of trying to fix it.

First, try to update the driver using the Hardware Manager. No dice, the driver is current. Rubbish, I know it is isn't. Then, go to ATI's website to pull the latest and     [continued...]

There are only two must-have tools for Windows that are on my machines. If you are running an OS later than XP (Vista or 7), then there is only one.

Windows is let down by a poor file management tool. It tries to push file management into a quasi browser, Explorer, and the result is a bad compromise.

The first thing I do on any Windows machine is install xplorer² from Zabkat, a small software company run by a chap called Nikos. There is a free lite version and a subscription-based fully featured version. If you are a command line guru from the unix world, spring for the full featured version: the list of features is huge, you can read them here. If you don't need all those features, the free lite version will still provide much better file management and exploring abilities than the default Windows Explorer; two-pane browsing alone is worth it.

I've been using xplorer² for about a decade and bought a licence several years ago. It is the best file management utility I've found. It is even better than the various unix ones and I wish there was a port of it for Linux.

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I usually hesitate to write about Microsoft, because it's too easy a target, you're invariably preaching to the converted, and there's a million other people saying the same thing.

This one, however, just makes me shake my head¹.

Microsoft is offering a Family version of an upgrade to Windows 7. It allows you to upgrade three computers with one upgrade purchase.

Get this. The upgrade removes any previous capability you had to back up to a remote machine. Yep, you can't backup to another machine on your LAN, nor can you backup to a dedicated backup storage unit. You can only backup to the local machine.

For almost all casual users, backup to the local machine means backup to the same disk as the originals.

Backups serve two purposes: you can recover from your error when you accidentally delete a file; you can recover from a hardware failure when     [continued...]