Today’s
technical challenge was fixing Dan’s Dell XP DVD drive. Dan got the PC after his father passed away
and so it has great sentimental value to him.
The standard
technique of removing and reinstalling the DVD player via Device Manager did
not work. Deleting the driver files didn’t
work. Trying to install a new driver
from Dell and/or elsewhere on the web did not work because all sites I tried wanted
to install a crapware download manager that did not fix the problem. Lacking an XP disk, I couldn’t extract the
file from the installation disk. System
Restore couldn’t fix the problem since the two available restore points would
not reinstall.
I was ready
to give up and go have lunch with Dan, which was why I came over in the first
place, when Dan said he had some Dell CD disks that might help. I give it another go. BIOS/boot tools proved the DVD to be working
and that it was a driver problem. Using
an old Google search trick (site:Microsoft.com), I searched only the
Microsoft.com web site and was able to find, download and install the needed
driver.
The unhappy
lesson is how hard it is to support XP using Google. In the past when I needed a driver for XP, I
could Google multiple driver download locations and install the needed device
driver from a myriad of locations. Today
all I got was crapware—even from Dell. I successfully solved a 5-minute problem in
under an hour.
What I did
notice while working on the problem was that maintaining optimism throughout
the process helped me to keep working on it.
Worst case was either reinstalling Windows XP from a disk I was no
longer using or getting a new DVD drive, either method would solve the problem
the next time I came over.
We had a
nice lunch. I drove Dan home and waited around Seattle for an hour to meet Jennifer
after work. She had agreed to take my
gratitude booklets to the Area Assembly in Ocean Shores. We met at Uwajimaya, bought enough food to
get free validated parking and chatted for awhile.
I am grateful
for my technical skills, my friends and cool grocery stores like Uwajimaya.
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