Report from Geek-dom

So yesterday I tried -- again (probably the fourth try in 12 months) -- to set up a home network, one that would allow our desktop computer, which runs XP, and our laptop, which runs Vista, to communicate with each other. Ideally, the network would also allow the laptop to communicate with devices that are connected to the desktop machine, like our printers and our back-up drive.

Google lists lots of articles that purport to show how to create such an XP - Vista network. I read all 299,999, 999 of them. None of them works.

Well, no harm, right? All I did was waste a few hours.

Wrong. By the time I had finished, not only could the XP computer not communicate with the Vista computer, it also had lost the ability to communicate with the internet. After an hour or so of fiddling, I gave up, went to bed, and cried myself to sleep.

This morning, I tried a little more poking and prodding and tweaking, all to no effect. And then "Well, I've got nothing to lose. I may as well try System Restore."

You know System Restore, right? It's Windows's utility that is supposed to return your system to the way it was at an earlier date. Except that it never works.

Well, not "never." This time it did!

In the immortal words of geeks everywhere, Hello, World!

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Note: Yes, "Windows's." See, for example, The Grammar Curmudgeon.
Which reminds me of one of my first posts on this blog.