Wednesday, July 27, 2005

I worked on a laptop yesterday. It was another Dell running Windows XP. I can't tell you how many Dells I have worked on in the past six months. Does this mean that Dells are junk? Probably not, I think that it means that there are so many people out there who own them. If I were to take a guess at what type of computer I fix most it would have to be Dell. Anyway, the laptop was a return visit. I originally fixed it last week. It was plagued with spyware and viruses. A clever virus had the CDROM drive disabled so I was unable to install any software that way. Luckily, upon examining the startup menu, I noticed an executable file with a suspicious name, it had the words cdrom in the file name. I deselected it as a startup item and upon the next boot the drive worked. After that point it was simply a matter of booting to Safe Mode and cleaning the machine up. I tried to drop the laptop off at the owners how the following day but I was informed that she would be out of town.

About a week had passed and the owner called to set up a time when I could drop her computer off. I met with her, explained what the problems were and how to combat them (don't open attachments, scan downloaded files with antivirus software and be careful). The following day I recieved a call from the Dell owner. She was having problems again. I told her I would be at her house in a half hour to check it out. I arrived at her house and she booted up the machine, it stalled. I attempted to boot into Safe Mode, it stalled again. I asked her what was going on when it began to have problems. She said that there wasn't anything inparticular. She was downloading some updates and it stalled. I realized that the problem most likely wasn't related to any of the previous work I had performed. Then I tried Last Know Good Configuration and that failed. I shut the machine down the hard way - by holding the power button down for as long as it takes, put the laptop in its case and headed home.

I began working on the machine. I booted to Safe Mode and let the machine load for about fifteen minutes. It finally came alive! That's when an error message popped up telling me that updates had not been completely installed and that some components of Norton Antivirus had not been completely removed. The evidence was plain as day. The problems were not with the work I had performed but they were caused by the user. I accessed the System Restore feature (I set a restore point after I cleaned up her machine the first time.) and restored the system to a date when I was certain that the computer was functioning properly. I rebooted to finish the process and the computer was back to a healthy state.

I will return it to her tomorrow - free of charge.