Got the modem (coolest little thing I ever saw. Gadget-freak, me? Whatever gave you that idea?), plugged it in. Windows froze. Restarted. Uninstalled the USB drivers. Windows detected “new hardware” and reinstalled the USB drivers. Plugged the modem in. Windows froze. Restarted. Tried all sorts of other stuff that really, let’s face it, wasn’t going to help. Windows froze a lot. I restarted a lot. Watched Parkinson (Jamie Oliver on Parky – way cool!). Started reading the manual thing for the MSI mainboard. Opened the side of the tower and looked at all the wires. Closed it again. Phoned Komplett.no to confirm that they really are closed all weekend (get this: their support is only open Mon-Fri, 9am to 4pm. Guess what time I’m normally expected to be at work?). Had a bit of chocolate. Decided I would restart again and go into setup to check whether any BIOS settings for USB were actually enabled. Don’t like setup, I’m always certain I’ll press the wrong button and make the unit blow up (if you’d had any idea what amount of metaphorical blowing up various bits of hardware has done to me lately without me doing anything as spectacular as entering setup-equivalents you wouldn’t laugh).
Enter setup. Locate USB settings. There are two of them. “USB Controller: 6 USB Ports”. I think that’s kind of fishy, as I can only count four, but the book says 6 and that “this setting is used to disable/enable the onboard USB controllers”. Hm, best leave that. The other setting says “USB 1.1 Device Legacy Support: All device”. And the book says “Set to all device if you need to use any USB 1.1 device in the operating system that does not support or have any USB 1.1 driver installed, such as DOS and SCO Unix.” Well, I don’t want to use DOS or SCO Unix, and both my USB devices are 2.0 anyway. It’s worth a try, the worst thing that could happen is Windows freezing again (I don’t actually think this will make the box blow up). So I save settings and exit and plug in the modem and voilla! Here I am.
Still not quite sure what that was all about, but it works now, so why worry?
Music in my head: Youth of the Nation (P.O.D. is it? I think there must have been an ad for the album on telly just now)