help with upgrade

[t1M0vkny]

I was having trouble understanding whether to soft reset or put my phone in bootload mode before going into the software upgrade utility part of the process. My computer wasn't recognising the phone. I finally got it to work and all seemed well until somewhere along the line the computer stopped recognising the phone again. Now I can't even get out of the bootloader screen mode - it perpetually says Serial and is dimmed out. I tried soft resetting but I got nothing.

is my phone useless now?