I had an idle moment the other day.

While musing on the state of the planet, it crossed my mind that I hadn’t updated my SatNav in a very long time. What that has to do with the state of the planet, I don’t know but the thought was there nevertheless. I decided to update it.

Possibly that was a mistake.

You see, Garmin in their infinite wisdom and ignorance have decreed that Linux doesn’t exist so I have to cross to the Dark Side and use Windows. And as SatNav updates seem to be incredibly slow, taking hours to complete, I use a old spare laptop with a dud keyboard.

So I plugged everything up and fired up Windows. “Aha” it says “you need to update the SatNav downloader program”. So I installed the latest version. It kept crashing. Fuck!

I dried uninstalling a load of crap that might have interfered with the program. It still didn’t work. So I decided in a moment of frustration to restore Windows back to the factory settings. That took a couple of hours. I then tried installing the program again. It still kept crashing. Thrice fuck!

I searched the Interwebs and found a possible root of my problem – the Garmin program doesn’t like Windows 7. I don’t like it either but there was no need for it to be so fucking sniffey.

I searched the Interwebs again and discovered that I can still upgrade to Windows 10 for nothing. In my book, 10 is an abomination but it was either that or a dud laptop and an out of date SatNav. I kicked off the upgrade.

Several hours later, including many reboots and silly messages – “Hi” [no kidding. That was one message], “This process may take a couple of minutes” [translate that to hours] – it finally announced the arrival of 10 with a little fanfare. So my old laptop is back working again, without any of the programs I had originally installed. I ran the downloaded updater thing again. Finally, about ten minutes later it asked me to plug in the SatNav. I was right – loads of updates of maps, speed traps and other stuff. Grand. I kicked it and it started the process.

About four hours later it announced with a flourish that my SatNav was completely up to date. I am now clear to drive anywhere in Europe.

It’s a pity I only have two hospital trips in the next couple of weeks. And I know where the hospital is.

I don’t know why I do these things that always seem to end up being overly complicated.

I can’t decide whether it’s boredom or masochism.