I had one of those wake up calls today where I remember why its best not to leave all the thinking to someone else.
Microsoft’s XP Windows Update site pushed an upgrade to my home PC. Since it is automated, all I had to do was say “yes” to reboot the system after the update arrived. Once I did, I got a “blue screen of death”, had no working audio, and shortly found several dead files written to my hard drive. Of course, the WU Crash dialog appears shortly after my 3rd reboot, telling me that Microsoft has no idea what just happened. Funny, my PC worked just fine up until today.
To make this long story short, Microsoft pushed down drivers for my nForce2 APU audio SoundStorm product, and they were very broken. I had to roll back to older drivers on the nvidia.com web site to get working again. Now the Windows Update site keeps demanding that I install the “new” drivers again.
Talking with some folks at NVIDIA, it sounds like I’m not alone in this debacle. It was proof enough again why taking human common sense out of the loop on technology is a bad, bad thing. Shame on you, Microsoft.