AlanBarber.Org
Friday, August 12, 2005
Shesh! What a mess!
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 It’s outdated sure but it still has important updates that aren’t on the system.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.
