Weekend Work - Sunday, June 29

Driving in this morning, I noticed all of the tree limbs down from the storm last evening.

Kathy and I came in early and she proceeded to clean up Dan's second PC. It was a bit dusty, so she took it outside to get rid of the dust and dust bunnies in the case.

I closed up the case and called Dan. Since he was likely at church, I knew it would be later today before he came in.

Last evening, while at Zach's birthday party, I took in another sick PC. It was Shawn's Compaq notebook, running Vista. David told me that when he opened the display up, no image would appear on the monitor, but you could 'see' it was on. Suspecting it might be a backlight or the inverter, I told him to let me look at it, so they brought it to me. Of course, when I picked it up and turned it on, it worked for me. I took it with me to the shop for dissection if necessary since it seems like something is fubar with it.

Angelia's cousin dropped by to pick up her PC and Paul stopped to get his. I told him about the profile issue I was seeing and suggested he back things up and reinstall from the restore CD Dell provided. The spyware and viruses on the machine had corrupted the Default and All Users profile and any new user created would always have a corrupt profile.

I started working on the tower that was dropped off late yesterday. It would boot up in safe mode, but would not switch the monitor 'on' and display any video in normal mode. Suspecting it might be the video card not switching properly, I changed it out. No dice. I removed all of the peripheral cards just in case. Same issue.

I finally booted to a rescue CD and renamed all of the profiles and let it restart. This time it came up and I was able to log in, but it was painfully slow. I opted to scan it for viruses and spyware and it took almost all day to complete. It had several on it, but nothing that appeared to be causing the slowness.

I tore into Shawn's notebook and found the video cable was ever so slightly out of its socket. I don't know for sure if that was the issue, but I couldn't make it 'not' work.

I set it aside and opened and closed it several dozen times to see if it continued to work as expected and it did. Maybe I fixed it?

I moved back to the tower and still scanning for spyware and viruses.

While that was going on, I had Kathy go home and close up the house and set the alarm. Since we were both in town with only one car, there was no sense in going back to the house just to do that after closing time.

Before she left I asked her to go to Golden Chick to pick up me a chicken tender sandwich and some iced tea. I love their iced tea. She left and about that time David came by to inquire about Shawn's notebook.

Since I couldn't positively express that I have resolved the issue and I had only invested about 15 minutes in total time working on it, I told him not to worry about the bill. I explained that the best thing to do was to use it and, if it occurs again, replace the video cable to the LCD.

About 30 minutes after she left, Kathy came back with the food from Golden Chick. She had been in the drive-thru line all of that time. It was so bad, she watched a trucker pull up, get out, go inside, order his food, eat it and leave before she could inch her way through the line. And, of couse, once you get in the line, you can't get out.

Needless to say, she wasn't very happy.

Dan dropped by and picked up his PCs and was thankful they were ready to go.

About 2:00 pm a family dropped by to inquire what it would take to clean a laptop. I explained that it was difficult to say with certainly, but our 'Critical Care Service' topped out at less than $100. During our conversation we learned the machine had LimeWire on it at one time, as well as other peer-to-peer applications. I was certain it would be infected.

The father said he would go get it and bring it back if I could work on it today. Never turning down a customer in need, I told him I would. He came back about 15 minutes later and I started working on it. This one was like Dan's PC from yesterday. It was a trojan that loads up spools.exe for every file you attempt to launch.

I made quick work of that issue and then started scanning for spyware. This machine was an older Dell notebook and was a little slow, so scanning and removing took longer than normal.

The owner came back and was waiting on it at 4:00 pm. It still wasn't finished, so I engaged him in conversation, eventually finding out he was a technical consultant for the windmills that are being built in Jack County. I was quite fascinated by some of the facts about the wind farm.

Each one cost about $2.1MM to build. He said that 26 are 'ready to go' with another 24 or so in various states of completeness. They are being built by the Spanish-firm Gamesa. When finished, the Gamesa-owned farm will be about 70 strong. When completed, Gamesa is expected to sell the farm, probably to an energy company in America.

There are about 40 people building the farm now, but he has worked on much larger farms where as many as 300 people are employed. The blades on the windmills are 146 feet in length and the tower tops out at about 300 feet tall. They hook up to the substation via buried cable and replant all of the grass around the site when they are done.

They climb inside the structure to get to the top and the temps inside, during this time of year, can reach 140°F. He is from the Abilene area, the 'state capitol' of windmills, he said.

I finished their PC up, confirmed it was clean, and sent them on their way.

While all of this was going on, I had been keeping an eye on the tower I was working on. The scan was finished, now, but it wasn't acting right, still. I suspect it might be Norton Internet Security slowing it down. I called the owner and left a message. I will have to continue working on this one once I talk to her and discuss the options.

A customer called on Saturday and wanted me to drop by to look at a PC that was hit by lightning. I dropped by today and it was dead. I filled out the paperwork for the insurance company for them. During the last storm (a few weeks ago) they lost a TV, garbage disposal and some other items. I didn't see anything fried on it, but it was dead, and it happened at the same time as the other items, so it stands to reason the two are related.