Insomniac Nightmares

Not about fiction, writing, or anything that’s actually relevant. Just going to rant for a second.

I use a Mac. I know that makes some of your eyes bleed, your brains boil, your blood pressure rise; I have a reason for it. In the dim dark days of my youth, I worked in video production and television broadcasting. If you wanted to do that sort of thing, or graphic design, or audio editing, or any creative field, really, you used a Mac. They were the workhorses in that department, and though they were pretty expensive for “just a computer,” they frequently ended up being more bang for the buck when you were doing those things because that’s what they had been built for and the software was built around it.

That isn’t necessarily the case, anymore – FCPX is a damned embarrassment, most of the rest of the Apple Creative Suite has been killed off, rolled into gimped features of FCPX or hasn’t bothered to be updated or functional for any recent systems, and the hardware inside is functionally identical to most Windows PCs – but 20 years ago, that was the way. Since I did a lot of work from home and had to do some edit jobs on location, my home computer and laptop were Macs, too; everything talked to each other, the same software was on all of them, got the job done.

I’ve kept with it primarily to keep that “everything talks to each other” ability and because for the most part, it does what I want it to. There’s the occasional roadblock (not having a Mac executable for games or certain software, mostly), sometimes circumvented by a VM or a Wine wrapper, but nothing major. When it does become a major issue, there’s the wonders of BootCamp. I have Windows 10 on my machine (unwillingly; they removed support for Windows 7, unfortunately.), and lately I’ve been spending more time in there than on macOS, since I’ve been diddling with RPG Maker and streaming software that don’t like running under macOS.

That’s fine. I’m not entirely happy about it, but I have it configured how I want it and it does the damned job. Until the 15th. Windows arbitrarily decided to update. Which it does without warning, and frequently just decides to reboot when I’m in the middle of something. Doesn’t ask, just does. Charming little trick, that. But this last update completely borked my network adapter.

My internet is supposed to be 200 down, 5 up (why the disparity, I dunno; my old service was 40 down, 20 up, and I liked it just fine, but that carrier isn’t available in my new neighborhood.) Now, my computer is upstairs (though it’s an open loft, not strictly a second floor) and I’m connecting via WiFi, so I don’t expect it to be perfect, but since that update, I get an average of .4 down. Still get 5 up, for some reason, but the upload speed doesn’t mean dick when you can’t even open WordPress or your cloud-based manuscripts and Twitter is acting like an old school AOL message board.

Reset the router/modem. Tested every other device on WiFi sitting next to the computer. Split the network and force connected to 5ghz. Nothing helps. Reboot to macOS, getting 70-120 down, 5 up (which is an acceptable degradation, given circumstances, and not unexpected… but at least it’s functional.)

Look into the problem, discover this is a known issue that has happened many times before (pretty much at least once a year since Win10 hit, which just reinforces my loathing for it and desire to go back to Win7, which worked just fine, thank you.) So now I’m having BootCamp redownload its own drivers, so I can forcibly overwrite them on the Windows side. Hopefully I can find a way to disable the auto updates for the network card, so it doesn’t do that crap again. But we’ll see.

So if anyone’s wondering why there isn’t a new and exciting content today, that’s why. Fighting with goddamn updates and reinstalls all bloody day. Ugh.