Thursday, March 17th, 2005

Is it true that Spring is a mere four days away? Here in Vermont Spring is more than a month away! Before Spring comes mud season! Living on a dirt road you prepare for mud season. Rutts a foot deep, pools of muddy water splashing up onto the windshield etc...Anyway, this week I have delt with a few of the "same old, same old" issues (spyware and viruses) and then I had a couple of different problems to solve. I visited the client I spoke about in my last post (80 gig drive, DSL setup). The first step was to transfer the data from the old drive to the new. This process took over an hour and a half. I actually left the site and came back, saving my client a few dollars, she was happy about that! After the drive data transfer was complete I had to change a bios setting so that the new drive was recongnized as the boot drive, change the jumper settings to "master", rebooted, crossed my fingers - success! and off I went to the Verizon DSL installation.

I ran the software and encountered the same error as with the previous installation attempt. The software stopped halfway through. I was able to ping the router and had Internet connectivity periodically. I looked into network settings and didn't spot anything abnormal. After about twenty minutes of getting nowhere I decided that instead of beating myself up over finding the solution I would again save my client some money and get on the phone with Verizon tech. support. The person I spoke with really knew his stuff! I explained the spotty Internet connection, told him what I had looked into and within minutes he asked if there was a previous version of Verizon DSL software installed on the machine; indeed there was. I uninstalled the software, looked into the router settings and we thought we had it nipped, no, not quite. Eventually we figured out that the Verizon software did not like the user name which it entered (it must have grabbed it from the old settings) for my client. I looked at a piece of paper my client gave me with some Verizon notes on it and I found another password which I entered. When I checked the router status a positive connection to the Internet was established - success. I thanked the support person for his fifteen minutes of time, installed Zone Alarm Firewall and was on my way home; all of this took a bit over three hours.

I just finished up on a Windows 98 machine. The client dropped off the machine tonight. I sat right down and got to it. The machine is a classic case; Windows 98, antivirus that has not been updated (Panda), no firewall, no spyware detection/removal tools etc...My first contact with the Microsoft Windows logo appeared as the clicks and clacks - oh nevermind, let me get on with the story. The machine stalled at the first sign of a Microsoft logo. I rebooted into Safe Mode using the F8 key and ran msconfig to see what was going on. I found eAccelerator - deselected and then removed several other entries (One of the client's complaints was that the machine started up slowly.) that did not need to start up - at all! Next, I checked out Panda. It didn't run. I took another look at the start up menu using msconfig, looked up a few processes, rebooted and struggled to that classic view called Windows 98 SE. I installed the usual set of tools - AVG, AdAware, SpyBot. Anyway - here is the log of what I did:
booted computer - froze
restarted in safe mode
removed unecessary startup items
tried running Panda - failed
rebooted
installed AdAware - 586 problems corrected
installed AVG (per client request)
installed Spybot Search and Destroy - failed
tried several times to install Spybot - system froze
ctrl + alt + del to shut down the spybot installer
rebooted - ran AVG found 6 viruses - deleted 3, manually deleted 3
deleted TEMP file folder contents
deleted Temporary Internet Files
checked to see if SpyBot installed, it did, ran SpyBot found 3 bad files - removed
removed Panda Antivirus (per client request)
rebooted
emptied recycle bin
installed Zone Alarm Free edition (per client request)
rebooted
installed USB Ethernet adapter, connected to network
updated AVG
updated AdAware
updated Spybot
disconnected from the Internet
scanned with AdAware - 7 problems fixed
scanned with Spybot - no problems reported
scanned with AVG - 3 infected objects detected - removed
scanned with AVG - no infections found
ran windows update - found 48 critical updates - installed
rebooted
ran scandisk and disk defragmentor - free of charge
and finished in three hours - not too bad