Drivers and whatnot

A few minutes ago, I had two options:

1) Rant, rave, curse, and kick my computer
2) start posting a blog entry to rant and rave, hoping I'll forget to kick the computer.

You see, over the last few weeks I've been having more issues with the computer hanging or being slow and unresponsive. Normally a reboot was adequate to fix it, but sometimes the applications that I had open would refuse to shut down within any reasonable time frame. I finally decided that it's probably overdue for being optimized.

Another related issue had to do with firefox 3.5, which was occasionally taking forever to start up. Seriously - like 20 minutes from click to window. That's unnecessary. Everything else had been fine.

Then there's Warcraft. I've installed the original warcraft on my two computers and would love to be able to set Caleb at one as the Orcs and me at the other being human and just battle to the death.

I realized that dust was probably building up within my computer, which could account for a lot of things, so a few hours ago, (when Farmtown on Facebook hung and made everything unresponsive) I pulled it out, took off the cover, and started cleaning out the dust. It was way past time for that. This was insanely dusty.

After this ordeal, I did the most important stuff first - connected the phone line between the two and tried to run the direct-link game. I came to discover that the modem driver on my main PC had not been installed, and now we come to the frustrating part.

I went to dell's website for the driver. I entered the service tag # (which I'd remembered to jot down for just this kind of purpose) and it pointed me to the correct drivers. Now it said that I could download the driver directly, but it recommended the driver update manager to do it. "Fine," I said, and agreed. When it downloaded and began to run, it added that I needed the .NET framework for the manager to work. Reluctantly, I agreed to allow it.

This took a very long time to install. If I'd had any idea that it would take this long, I would have given up on it completely. Naturally, the computer was worthless for anything else as it downloaded the updates, hung on the installation screen, and finally allowed me to continue. Then, of course, Firefox had hung up, and I couldn't get back to the drivers and downloads screen.

I think I've restarted the computer three or four times, reinstalled firefox, and tried to run things through Chrome, but the problem seems to be even worse now than before. What's more - anytime I get back to Dell's site to download the driver, when I click on the driver link it re-downloads the update manager. There is no link directly to the driver files I needed in the first place.

I'm thinking that I began this process with the clean-out at around 9pm. It's 12:30 and I'm really not much closer to having any of these problems solved than I was when I started. Let this post be a loud "BOO!" to Dell, .NET, and yes, even Firefox 3.5.1 for being impossibly hard to deal with. Thanks for a fabulous evening.

*kick*