Monday, April 11, 2006

Busy, busy, busy - too busy to blog! Over the past few months I have been keeping busy with websites. I completely overhauled this site The Spirit of Ethan Allen III. I did some more work on this site Welcome Kitchen Catering. I started a new site for the Creative Quest Summer Arts Day Camp and I got a call over the weekend about building a site for Onion River Chiropractic.

I worked on one computer (another Dell) where the client suspected spyware, or possibly a worm. The only sign of anything wrong (according to the client) was that the computer was running slowly. I picked up the machine, brought it to my shop and began the usual process of checking for problems (check startup menu, scan for viruses, spyware and adware etc..). As usual there were a few spyware findings but nothing critical - just tracking cookies. The end result was $50 in RAM (giving the machine a total of 512 MB) and two hours of my time and the machine is running perfectly.

I worked on another Windows 98 machine. This one had some problems, nothing major, just some spyware. The complaint was that the machine was spitting out errors when attempting to run some kids games. I don't mean graphics intense games or anything that is demanding of resources. The machine wasn't even going to have Internet access. I cleaned the machine removing five or so spyware applications and then I was tasked with installing about eight kids games -easy money! I picked that one up on a Sunday evening and dropped it back off on Tuesday. The clients were quite happy.

I was supposed to pick another computer up yesterday. I got a call over the weekend from a woman who didn't know what the problems were. I asked her if she could tell me what operating system she was using and she didn't know. When I asked what kind of problems she was experiencing she said that it was slow and the cd drive would not open. I was scheduled to pick it up yesterday at 3:00 but early in the morning I got a call from her husband who left me a message stating that he did not want to waste a "few hundred bucks" on a machine that is obsolete (about three years old!) so he went out and bought a new one. He said, "I am just going to throw the other one away!" I hope that he really didn't mean what he was saying. I hope her recycles the thing!

Also yesterday, I went to a house to troubleshoot a problem with a game "The Battle For Middle Earth II". The problem is that when the game is run it crashes and reports that there is a problem with game.dat. Upon investigation (Google) I realized that this computer is not alone! There are many users experiencing the same problem. It looks like the solution is going to be a video card driver update. The computer is lacking access to the Internet so I was not able to update the driver but I was told that they would be getting Internet access soon. The sad part is that this poor kid saved up $50 to buy the game and he has not been able to play it!