I Borked My Computer!

From Bill's Urban Dictionary: Bork - verb meaning to royally screw up. I.e. to take a hammer and smash utterly. Example: "I can't believe I borked my computer!"

Tuesday night the frustrating saga of the dropping wireless connection at home was driving me crazy. Sometimes its brilliant, other times complete crap. I've been trying different solutions when I stumbled across a Knowledge Base article from Microsoft describing a hotfix for my exact symptoms.

Ecstatic with glee, I downloaded and installed the hotfix and re-booted the PC... only to find my networking was completely and utterly broken. I.e., borked. To make matters worse, I had not backed up the files impacted in the operating system so unborking the computer was going to require some serious fancy footwork. I.e., praying to the Computer Gods.

Yesterday at work I tracked down files and slunk home to fix the computer. I had butterflies in my stomach and sweat on my brow as I rebooted after uploading the new files. Would it work? Or had the borking been permanent?

To my eternal relief, the network came up and was as annoying as usual, dropping every 5-10 minutes or so. Whew! I am now back to looking for solutions to the issue but I think I'll avoid any OS DLL tinkering for a while and stick to changing network setups.