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My uncle dropped off my grandfather and grandmothers computer tonight.  My uncle was trying to show my grandfather how to resize pictures or something and the computer keep on locking up.

I said to send it my way and I’ll take a looksy at it.  I’ve spent the last few hours cleaning the cruft out of the thing.

Let’s see.

First I did the standard scandisk / defrag.  Just want to get the basics out of the way first.  Then I fired up the registry editor and checked out what was set to run on start up on the computer (this is windows ME by the way).  Whoa!  Talk about a lot of useless junk.  Well I remove the junk and whip out my handy dandy usb thumb drive.  Pop that sucker in and install Adaware and Spybot Search & Destroy.  EEP!  Even more junk!  Between the two apps I manage to find about 20 different pieces of spyware/malware on the system.  Well I wiped all that out.

Right now as I write this I’m installing windows updates from the Security Update CD I blogged about last year.  It’s outdated sure but it still has important updates that aren’t on the system.  I’m on dialup remember so I’m not going to bother downloading more updates.  They can just take what I give them.

I’m not sure exactly what type of picture resizing they were doing so I can’t reproduce exactly what they were doing to cause the lockups but tomorrow I’ll see what I can find.

If I didn’t hate doing this so much I should do this for a job.  I could make big bucks cleaning peoples computers of the crap they manage to put on them.

Where has the time gone? My little brother is off to college in another month. So, I get to build him a box. Whoopie!

Well here’s the specs:
Shuttle SN25B SFF Case (with skt 939 nforce4 based mobo)
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (Venice core) CPU
1GB (2x512mb) Corsair XMS PC3200 Ram
200Gig Western Digital SATA Drive
Plextor PPX-712SA SATA dual layer DVD Burner
CONNECT3D Radeon X800XL 256M PCIE Video Card

Should be a nice system for college. Plenty fast yet won’t take up a lot of room in a dorm. All the parts should be here in a few days so once I get it tossed together I’ll run a few benchmarks and show off the numbers.

This will be my first real SFF system. My girlfriends system was in a very small case but was still a micro-atx based system. Jamming all that junk in a 8x8x12 inch box sounds like fun!

This is probably really, really old for some people but I just found it a few days ago.  Figured I’d share it since there’s no hurting in turning a few new folks to this stuff.

The Acts of Gord is a website created about a guy that ran a Video Game store.  There are just tons and tons of funny little stories.

Anyhoo, check it out for a good laugh when you’re bored some time.

http://www.actsofgord.com