What a hassle, man

Yesterday was a bit of a hassle. It started off strong - a trip to the mall where I found some fun stuff for low prices.
When I got back home, I was tooling around on my friend's computer, and thinking about how he's been complaining about lots of little system quirks - his mouse locking up, computer crashing during games, network disconnecting and such. I know computers a bit better than him, so I decided to see if I could fix a few of these, mainly by downloading more current drivers for everything.
The problem was really Microsoft. His video card driver wanted the .Net framework to be installed, and to do that, I went and used Microsoft's automatic updates. I don't think he's updated his computer in...well, ever. So it installed like 60 security patches - that's good. But it also slipped in new versions of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player.
Around that time, my friend came home, and...well, there were just little things out of place that he immediately picked up on. To start with, his favorites for IE went away. (After I got him to calm down and let me sit down at the computer, I found them tucked safely in a subfolder.) Windows gave him a popup about security. The icons of his media files changed. He had a bit less disk space. All these little things that are mostly meaningless and easily fixed, but drove him nuts because he had everything set up -just so-.
I mean, I don't blame him. It was my bad, I poked buttons I shouldn't have. What bothered me was that he'd freak out about easy things, and not give me a chance to fix them. Like the issue with his media icons changing. Easy fix - download a new icon you like, and change the file association.
The big issue was Windows Media Player 10. That installed, and he was used to WMP9. So I had to go hunting around the internet until I found a site that showed how to use the registry to roll back to WMP9 from 10. I think the skin still changed. I asked him why he wanted WMP9 so much, and it was just Microsoft vitriol - 'I know 9, but I don't know what 10 will do'. But, I got that taken care of.
Now I just have to hope that nothing else goes wrong. I think I got everything back the way it was. I'm just pissed at myself, the computer geek of sorts, messing up everything I didn't have a right to mess with. Really, all I did was update his system and close a ton of security holes, but I shouldn't have done it if he didn't want it.

Anyway, last night turned into an all-nighter. Not by choice, mind you. The computer is in the room where I sleep, so it's harder to politely excuse myself. For some reason, I've never been able to just tell this friend 'no, I don't want to watch X or stay up all night doing Y.' Maybe that's why I like hanging out with him, he challenges me. But he just leaves you with no gaps to break away from a conversation, even if that conversation is going on until 8am. I finally just laid down and went to slepe, because I was damned tired. I'm not a teenager anymore; I still pull all-nighters, but it's under the conditions of my choosing. Still, it's good training for when I run that all-night game at the convention on Friday. Maybe after that I can start going to bed at, like, midnight, and waking up earlier in the morning. I'd like that better.