I hate Vista updates

Yes, I have PC running Vista, and every time I update it something gets messed up that used to work fine before. This last update just pissed me off though. I like to be able to play WoW and watch TV at the same time, or at least have the TV on in the background while I play. Well that's hard to do with a PC because you have to set up your computer station with easy access to a TV, and my house isn't really set up for that, so I went bought a new laptop about 8 months ago that I had custom made from one of those PC builder sites. Decided against one of the prebuilt systems like the Dell or Sony computers, they tend to have some of what I want plus a bunch of extra crap that I don't need, which isn't optional so you pay for the whole package, and the upgrade options are very limited. Well I'm against paying for stuff that I don't need and will never use just to get some of the setup I want and then have to buy more upgrades separately that may or may not work well with the system. I find that those premade PC's are very hard to upgrade as they don't always accept the additions.

Back to the rant about the update. We all know Vista has a lot of problems, but I can deal with it for the most part, and since they keep providing us with updates those problems should start going away right? Well to play WoW I decided to get a separate mouse, that laptop touch pad just doesn't cut it for games (I play TFC2 sometimes as well, and blew through Portal in no time). When I first plugged in the mouse I figured I'd have to install the drivers for it, but as soon as I plugged it in to the USB port the computer detected it an installed in automatically. Sweet. So I messed with the settings a little, comes up as a generic mouse instead of the exact model, but didn't have any reason to change that as it was working fine. It also has extra buttons for forward, back, and switching between open programs (sort of like alt+Tab). For WoW I set up the back button as autorun and the forward button to jump (I hate NumLock for autorun, and being able to run and jump from just the mouse is nice for those long runs).

I just keep getting off topic don't I? Now that I've talked about my mouse setup you can probably guess what the last update did. That's right. My mouse totally stopped working. When I plugged it in it was no longer detected as a mouse but was now a game controller device. I guess I can see if this will work, so I let Vista try to install in automatically. No dice. OK, guess I have to install the drivers for it, so I rummage through all my system setup discs and find the CD for the mouse driver, pop it in and start the setup. It's installing, then when it finishes a message pops up "oh wait, this driver isn't Vista compatible." Once again Vista screws me over. Ugh, time to look for drivers online, and to make sure they work with Vista, and by this time it is already way past my bedtime but I'm so heated over this thing that I have to solve it or I won't be able to sleep as I will still be thinking about it. Finally I find a driver and install it, no errors this time, but when it's all done the mouse still isn't working. Alright, it didn't tell me to restart, but I will anyway just because sometimes that's what you need to do before the changes take effect. Bingo! Mouse works as soon as Vista is done starting up and I'm back in business...after about an hour of troubleshooting. Change some of the settings back to what I like, then get to bed.

But wait! the story isn't over yet. Now up until this point I haven't played WoW with the new settings, so next day I open up WoW, and wouldn't you know it? My key mappings aren't working anymore. This mouse driver has some kind of game settings so you can change the sensitivity if you like it different when you are playing games than when you are just on the desktop. That's cool I guess, but these game settings just screwed me over again, and I don't have a clue what these different options are gonna do so I open up the help file to see if I can find a quick answer. Of course not, the help file is terrible and doesn't help at all. Guess I'll have to figure this out on my own. After about 30 more minutes of alt+Tabbing back and forth between WoW and the mouse settings, manually setting up the mouse game settings to recognize WoW as a game and checking and unchecking various boxes that didn't explain very well what they were for, I finally got the game to recognize the buttons.

I don't even want to think about what I would have gone through if I had a PC and no touch pad to use as a backup mouse. I've done it before, and let me tell you, trying to remember all the keyboard shortcuts to navigate around without a mouse, while trying to solve a ridiculous problem, is probably one of the worst experiences I've ever had with computer troubleshooting. Moral of the story is don't let Vista use it's generic drivers for anything as they might stop working after one of these updates. It may be more work, but install the specific drivers for your device no matter what Vista tells you.