Ode To A Wasted Morning.

So. I am sat at my computer trying to kick start my working day when a 'nag window' pops up. 

This is yet another one from Nvidia who, after sitting in the background letting their graphics card offspring quietly get on with its job, have suddenly started to get needy and attention grabbing of late. Updates promising a better gaming experience have been dangled in front of me repeatedly.

I don't really 'do' games, certainly not on my work computers. But I do need a reasonably serious graphics card to handle the computer modelling and rendering tasks I throw at it, so I hit the 'install' button - what could possibly go wrong? A few minutes twiddling my thumbs should see me experiencing a new level of graphics handling capability, whole new worlds of visual pleasure will be opened up. Not that any of the previous updates have made any discernible difference in performance.

The 148Mb file starts to download. 148MB! What is that all about? My first serious computer had a hard drive smaller than that and this is just yet another update to what was then called a video card. Alarm bells start to ring as the progress bar fails to do much of that. Progress, I mean. What could be slowing things down? It is a fast computer with a fast broadband connection: I can only put it down to their servers creaking under the load.

I click to install, and wait.

I go and make a coffee.

I unload the dishwasher.

I wind up the clock in the study.

I prove that branching ratios of the Higgs Boson are consistent with the standard model.

I lied about the last one.

The installation bar continues to creep slowly across the screen so I try to buy a couple of things on eBay. Twenty five minutes have now passed. Then the screen goes black.

No problem. I expected something like this to happen. It has presumably got to the stage when it needs to disable the graphics card to update the software. A bit rude of it to not ask first, but so be it. The screen lights up again but with a resolution that has dropped to something I haven't had to work with for the best part of twenty years and the installer progress bar moves slowly on.

Then it stops.

A dialogue box appears. It says that the installation has failed, thank you and good night - though possibly not quite that politely. I am left staring at a screen with hugely magnified icons dripping off the edges. Good grief. Thanks Nvidia.

I manage to navigate my way to the unfeasibly large control panel and click on the Nvidia icon hoping that I can at least find a more user-friendly screen resolution before I attempt to fix it. A dialogue box appears telling me that I haven't got an Nvidia graphics card. Something of a surprise as I had been using it earlier.

There is only one way forward. Turn it off and on again. So I hit the shutdown button only to be informed that it will 'install updates and shutdown'. Updates. What updates? It must mean the Nvidia update but why are there six of them? What is going on? Is this some sort of cruel joke?

It takes over thirty long, grinding, minutes to install the updates and for the screen to go black. I press the on button with my fingers crossed that all will be well. And it is. Well, nearly. It comes back at low resolution and spends another six minutes to search the 'preconfigured driver folder' and asks for a reboot before all is back to normal.

So. Pressing that innocent looking 'install update' button has cut a swath through my morning with no discernible benefit - another PR triumph for the software companies. I could, of course have resorted to using my other work computer but that was sitting tantalisingly behind a KVM switch and past experience told me that a rebooting computer needs to have control of the monitor or else all manner of horrors will result. I just have to be patient.

The moral of this story is: 'When your graphics card asks to upgrade consider taking it to the nearest computer shop and having it levered out with a screwdriver - It may be quicker'. 

Have You Got Something To Prise This Key Out With?

I have just hit the damned 'insert' button again.

The problem is that, being located right next to the 'delete' button it is a key that can be pressed without you knowing. But you certainly know that something just happened because all of a sudden everytime you type a character it deletes the one in front of it. Not being a touch typist, I tend to look at the keyboard rather than the screen which means that this little monster can cut vast swathes through my carefully crafted prose before I realise what is going on. I don't do it very often so, every time that it rears its ugly head I forget which button I am supposed to press to cure it and I am reduced to trying to Google it. Which is when the word 'overwrite' would be useful if it came to mind - but it never does.

So what is the 'insert' button for, and why is it in such a stupid place? Heaven alone knows. The answer is presumably the same for the question; what is a 'caps lock' for in this day and age and why did some idiot put it next to the 'a'?

Accepting that there are a lot of keyboards out there, and there may be someone who finds these things useful, it is doubtful that we will ever be rid of them, but is it really beyond the wit of man to come up with a bit of 'keyboard management' software that allows people like me to turn these irritating keys off?

There is, actually, a method being peddled that involves 'adding some keyboard scancode mapping information to your Windows registry' Unfortunately even the description lost me at the word 'adding' so the chances of me succesfully disabling these keys without disabling the whole computer are slim to nill. The other technique often ventured is 'prising the offending keys out' - nice.

While Microsoft spend all their time messing up user interfaces why don't they divert some of that creative energy into something really useful like an idiot proof way of customising the keyboard? Something with a nice friendly graphic interface maybe? They're probably still trying to figure out why the letters keep disappearing while they type.