The other day, I told Windows to do an update to itself on my mother's PC. Given what happened then, I clearly should have told it to do something else to itself.
In a nutshell, the update completely hosed the video drivers. The machine went to ultralow resolution, and no amount of fiddling with drivers, graphics, video, resolution, or anything else that came to mind would make it go back to its prior state. At last, in desperation, I reloaded the operating system (which itself took three tries; Windows didn't like being told to overlay itself with an older copy). But finally, three hours later (or about fifty 'XP minutes'), it was up and running. And not talking to anyone. Further, it wouldn't talk to anyone until the wireless connection was established. Poking around, it appeared that the driver for the wireless card was - gone. Hmm, I thought, that damn thing was likely in the Windows directory that I just overlaid. (Pause for many bad words). It didn't help that we could not find the CD with the driver (or even remember if we'd gotten a CD). I brought the laptop out, and after about an hour of searching (my, this is fun), I found the site for Level One (the maker of the card and its driver), downloaded it to a CD on my laptop, put the CD into the drive on the other machine, ran it, and, hey presto, communications was up. Well, once I told the firewall that yeah, it was okay for that particular bit of software to pierce the firewall.
Afterwards, I wondered: is it possible to 'jump start' the networking by running a cable from a PC with a working Internet connection over to one without one, letting the ill one communicate through it? Seems like it ought to be...in my perfect imaginary world. Wonder how it is in reality? For some reason, I'm loathe to experiment.
Oh, and that driver? I saved a copy outside of Windows.
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