Saturday, March 19th, 2005

My appointment yesterday was a success. I arrive at the office and began talking with the office manager about the problem the computer was experiencing and what she has tried to do as far as troubleshooting goes (oh, I also dropped her PC off, I disinfected it the night before - it took three hours - she had over 600 spyware infections and 9 viruses - plus, 48 critical updates needed, I installed a firewall, antivirus etc.... her machine is running perfectly now - she will be very pleased!). I tried a few tests using ntbackup.exe. First I created a new, smaller back up job and attempted to run. It stalled half-way through. Then I created a backup job that sent the backup to another PC on the network (this way I could try to determin if the problem was in the software or hardware, or both). That was successful. This at least gave us a backup to work with incase the next step in the process went wrong. The next step was to sort through the event logs with Event Viewer to see when the errors began. Then to use System Restore to restore the system settings back to the way they were the day before the first error was recorded. I selected the date and hoped for the best. The computer rebooted and after a few tense minutes the Windows XP desktop began to come to life. The first thing the office manager did was to try to run a DOS based program which was not running since installing a Windows Update. It ran, she nearly jumped in the air. Then it was time to try ntbackup.exe. I formatted a blank CD-RW and used Task Scheduler to run the backup job. After about six minutes the backup was complete and after a few more, the backup was verified and we were happy. The office manager asked me what she should do about installing future Windows updates, since this was obviously the problem in the first place. I told her that she should install all "critical updates" and if the problem happens again we can always restore, or remove the update. I updated their antivirus software and was finished.

Another safisfied client: I walked out of the office watching people smile and go along with their work day. The office manager thanked me and I walked out the door.