NP: The Chick Corea Elektric Band, The Chick Corea Elektric Band

For those of you sick and tired of my whinging about technology problems, this may be your lucky day. If you count up all the installers, technicians and customer service reps that I've talked to at Comcast, it would seem that the fifteenth time or so is the charm. I don't know why the new single-stream card decided to work this time, but I'm not going to ask questions about it. The one thing I know we did differently was removing and replacing the working card in the first slot before we started all the signals flying. I'm not entirely ready to give that the credit for the win, though.

Meanwhile, the PC troubleshooting led me from my USB ports, to a SCSI driver that was popping up in the debugging files despite there being no SCSI devices connected to the box, and finally back to the Firewire card. Longtime readers, if there are any, may recall previous whinging about this one, but I had physically removed it from the motherboard at one point in the process and the machine kept hanging, so I had ruled it out.

Turns out that may have been hasty, and one of those countless instances of me knowing just enough to be dangerous. I don't think I uninstalled the drivers when I removed the card, and while re-installing the drivers didn't actually fix the problem, it got me back to suspecting the Firewire issue was the root of all the instability. After digging through the forums at Mackie, I found a lot of references to the notion that Service Pack 2 for Windows XP actually breaks Firewire outright.

I've now applied the patch, and have been rewarded with no hangs from tasks that previously brought the computer to a halt ever since. If I want to get crazy, I'll switch the external hard drives from USB to Firewire and see if the patch fixes that problem as well.

All of this means the biggest technological headache at present is the burnt-out light bulb in my ceiling fan. And the funny part is that I was porting my old MS-Word "diary" file into a more dedicated diary program, and found a short reference to rooting out a balky driver that was messing with my computer some 12 years ago. It stuck out because it was one of very few entries that wasn't about girls.