So over the last week I've:
- Installed the new wifi/Bluetooth card that doesn't perform any faster but drops out less frequently and doesn't cause my system to lock up at the sight of some data. The Bluetooth portion took some work; at first it said there was a power issue even though the additional USB was plugged in, I tried all kinds of things to get drivers installed but as it turned out, all I had to do was delete the driver I had already. As soon as I did that it automatically downloaded new drivers and was fine. The range is yuuuge, as opposed to the dongle I had previously that wouldn't reach the far end of my sofa.
- Installed the Intel 600p, but in cloning the old smaller drive (using dd via Ubuntu booted from a USB stick) it also, obviously, cloned the partition map so I've now got System Reserved, the main partition from the old drive, the recovery partition and a new 250GB partition. I will sort this out eventually... Probably.
- Attempted to install the drivers for my X-65F HOTAS, which is where years of neglect and quick fixes finally unravelled. First, running the driver installer wouldn't proceed after the prompt to plug the stick in. Then I tried unpacking the installer to do it manually and I got an error about the INF file being wrong, which was a bit of a brick wall. So I decided to see if I could use Wireshark to see what was wrong, it wanted me to update, I said yes for some reason then the installer failed while updating USBPcap, which then knocked out all of my USB ports! Fortunately I have Splashtop installed so I could use that to do some more investigation but I think I just want to back up a few game saves then nuke the lot, put my other SSDs in a RAID 0 set and start fresh.
Fun!