A Word in Your Eye

I have an FMV-P8270, a little notebook computer, that I really like and use at home, on weekends, and when traveling. And I have Windows Vista, which despite various folks assuring me that I must hate it, I have not had problems with. I let it tell me when there are updates, and most of the time, I just apply them...

But today, before noon, it assured me there was an update. So I let it proceed. And... when I turned it back on, the screen stayed dark. That's odd. Let's try that again. Crash and reboot. Dark screen, although the disk is doing something. Okay... crash, boot in safe mode. Huh, looks okay. Let's try regular mode again.

Apparently the update (Intel Graphics Media Accelerator Driver) doesn't work. So... uninstall. And ... still no go. Okay, let's find that... download, install, and -- what do you mean, one component failed, so you aren't going to install?

It's now about 5 hours later, and despite various downloads and whatnot, the system still won't show a screen on a regular boot.

I've also learned that Dragon NaturallySpeaking requires a normal boot (apparently the media drivers for little things like microphones aren't considered necessary for safe mode, which means those of us who depend on such things are SOL). So I'm making my fingers ache.

ARGGH! And I like computers!