The Upgrade Catch-22

I have a compulsion to upgrade. Whenever there is new release of any software or driver that I use, I MUST upgrade. The problem is, most of these upgrades/updates just cause problems.

This classic situation arose last night. Excel 2007 has been crashing recently when I used the build in scroll function of my ThinkPad T60p. I figured it was worth downloading the most recent drivers from IBM (OK, Lenovo). I used their auto-update tool, which of course found tons of updates to run, including the BIOS, etc.

It all seemed to go well until after the wireless card driver was updated and I re-entered the WEP key to reconnect. BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). After a couple reboots to make sure it wouldn't 'work itself out', I booted into safe mode (which took forever), and disabled the wireless driver. I then rolled back (using the nifty 'rollback button'. This solved the BSOD but I still couldn't connect. So I ended up downloading the newest driver again and installing, but it didn't seem to take. So I found a more recent driver I installed earlier this year and reinstalled it. It didn't work either. Well it did, but it took me a while to realize I was entering the wrong WEP key.

Bottom line, updates are necessary for security and often do improve functionality, but more often than not, when I update I find myself hacking/fixing something to get back to 'normal'.

This will have no impact on my reaction to the next shiny update though. I will still install immediately.

Oh, and I still don't know yet whether any of this fixed my Excel 2007 scroll problem. We'll see.