Well, I think it's time for the obligatory rant about PCs and technology from this Software Developer, Architect or whatever.

I've taken the week off with pretty much the only aim to get up to speed with a few bits and pieces that I don't have the chance to at work, such as .Net 3.5, Orcas, the MVP framework and all that good stuff. But I've been up against a brick wall of broken computers like you wouldn't believe.

First off I ran against problems with the Windows Update. I've got a dual boot XP/Vista machine. My Vista PC is a 64 Bit one, and I keep the XP one for games and anything that won't work on 64 Bit (such as my version of Nero). So I did both. I should have learnt never ever to download drivers from Microsoft. Apart from having all sorts of difficulties updating my XP machine (for some bizarre reasons the .Net Updates kept failing), one driver update totally trashed it and blue screened it on log on. It turns out it was the Soundblaster Driver I had updated. But this took some time to sort out. I needed this machine in order to burn the VS2008 disk I had downloaded so I had no option but to get this done.

So, once this was done I thought I'd do something crazy like backup my main data disk. It's about 150GB - Raid 1. But I thought it would be good to get an offline backup. So, I'm using Vista, and I'm sure I'd read somewhere that the backup for Vista was going to change my life. It did but what a pile of pony it is. I won't dwell on it but I think it's a real step backwards.

I left it running over night. And then my machine hung. Again. Now, in fairness it's been doing that for some time. So, as part of this job I thought I'd sort this little conundrum out. Again, and lots of experiments with PCI settings and burning a new BIOS. cutting a long story short, it turns out that the driver (isn't it always a flaming driver) was at fault. So off I went to the ASRock website and downloaded more drivers. And quite apart from vista constantly getting in my way, I thought I'd sort it out. But whatever I did I couldn't get it working satisfactory, so I eventually gave up and de-activated my RAID to do the backup (I thought this was wise - take a backup before re-establishing the mirror).

Oh, and this little chestnut managed to waste another hour.

The backup ended up taking nearly 7 hours. Rendering my machine fairly inoperable at the time. But the backup completed, and I'm guessing it's backed everything up - but I may well revert to robocopy, just to be sure it backs up everything.

The backup completed, so all I needed to do was to reinstall the driver software for my Raid device right? Yep. All looked good. So I was going to have a productive day today. So, I logged on, put some tunes on, and... and... "what the hell is that?". Every time I moved or scrolled a window, the sound juddered. I couldn't believe it. I'd managed to update my PC - backup my data and update my RAID drivers, and now my sound drivers were screwed. Never mind. Off to creative to update them.

It didn't work. It really sounded like there was some conflict going on, so off I went back to the BIOS and changed a lot of PCI/AGP settings. It didn't do much good. But I was glad I sorted out my XP build, as I confirmed that this wasn't having the same problem. So it wasn't a BIOS issue. So, maybe it was the graphics driver that was conflicting. So uninstall the RAID drivers. Unistall the Graphics drivers (which is harder than it sounds) and then off to NVidia for the lates Vista 64 Forceware update.

That then corrupted my graphics. I forgot about that. It always does. It seems to me that only the default Vista driver for the 7600GT works. Not even the NVidia or Microsoft updates work. So I put this back. And there was no judder on the sound. Good. Then I reinstalled the Chipset/RAID software from ASRock. The Judder returned.

This was getting irritating now. Luckily I had another option - I downloaded more drivers from VIA (it's a VIA chipset). But they wouldn't install. So back to uninstalling and installing everything in the right order - and - it worked...

So how long has this little exercise taken? 3 days. I repeat. 3 days. I really have no idea why its so difficult and I shudder to think what people not in the industry (or PC World employees for that matter, they're much the same thing) would have made of it.

But in the end - it's all down to drivers. Drivers are the root of all unstability in Windows. They always have been. Microsoft have gone to great lengths in XP SP2 and Vista to try and address this. But almost every problem I ran into was caused by drivers. If you've made it to the end of this article and you are a windows user the moral of the story is to be very careful when updating drivers. Make sure you know what you're doing (I didn't!). And make sure you're well backed up should it go wrong. And most importantly, only update them if you have to. And save yourself 3 days of pain.