The Mysterious Disappearing Drivers

So today I go to plug in my nice little USB mouse into my laptop, ready to do some work, and... .. nothing. Driver wouldn't recognize the mouse, and of course I am not going to dig through my boxes and boxes looking for whichever copy of a WinXP CD I may have installed from. And besides, what the hell kind of OS doesn't keep mouse drivers around as a pre-configured option? You know, so people can plug them in and use them without having to remember which service pack CD they need to put in to get the proper driver from.

At any rate, before I got my mouse working properly I managed to lose the functionality in my touchpad, install XP service pack 2, seriously consider formatting my drive and losing 2 days of productivit, figure out that there are about a million driver files stowed away in c:\windows\inf\, and finally figured out what "unknown device" that's been a sore spot in my lovely device manager for months. Apparently I own a Secure Digital card reader. Neat. I should go get a card to stick in there. And maybe a camera to stick the card in. Or maybe just forget about it again and save my money like I'm supposed to be doing.

This was officially the worst fight with computer hardware I've engaged in, even worse than any kernel compilation tangles with Debian. I hate computers.