Weekend Work - Saturday, July 19

My friend Chris stopped by first thing this morning. His head was all wet and his shirt was drenched. It seemed he was out at the lake early and the water looked so inviting his dunked his head in it to cool off.

While he was there a customer dropped off two PCs. The first, an old Dell GX1 desktop, the second a Dell mini tower, the Dimension L1000R. He wanted the older desktop to have Windows 95 reinstalled so he could get to his data. The mini tower 'won't power up' he said.

After the customer left and while Chris was still there, David and Sarah dropped by to say hello. It's been a while since I seen them, so we visited for a bit. Sarah was telling me about her recent car trouble and how the trip to the local Ford place for a replacement key fob resulted in replacing the car. She was also excited about 'the King' coming to Graham in August.

After they left, a previous customer arrived with his PC in hand. I had worked on it earlier this year and he was having trouble with it. The symptoms sounded like some malware had gotten installed. He stated it was freezing up and he was unable to get to some web pages, etc. I did a quick scan. Nothing out of the ordinary was going on, process wise, so I started asking more questions. The more we talked, the more it sounded like he might be having DSL issues. It sounded like he wasn't getting connected to AT&T and therefore the various apps that were expecting a network connection were 'hanging'.

I give him some pointers and what to check and how to power cycle the modem to get a new connection and sent him home to reconnect it.

Kathy arrived about this time.

Shortly afterward, he came back to say it wouldn't work. I knew it must be a DSL issue at this point, as it worked flawlessly on the bench. Since he was right down the street, I went by and sure enough, it wasn't connecting to AT&T. I power cycled the modem and everything started working again.

I got back to the shop and started working on the Win95 machine and the PC that my former boss dropped off last Sunday.

The former bosses machine needed a RAM upgrade, it was choking on 256mb and had a few hundred malware references on it. I removed those and scanned it for viruses, finding one active one, which I removed.

Back and forth, I worked between the two PCs.

I tried to reinstall Win95 on the old desktop and succeeded, but every time it would boot into 'enhanced' mode, it would give me an explorer.exe error. I switched the shell to progman.exe and it started up fine. I reinstalled IE 5.5 SP2 and tried explorer again, only to find it crashed again.

At this point I was hours into this issue and knew it wasn't worth continuing, so I began working on the mini tower. I found some loose connections and got it to power up. I replaced the drive that the customer had pulled and booted it up, to find it was running Windows XP.

I called the customer and told him about the '95 machine and that I had the XP machine up. He was happy to hear that and I asked if he needed me to copy the data from the desktop to the mini-tower and he confirmed this was the best solution.

Since this machine hadn't been on in some time, I scanned it and found some malware and found its AV database was out of sync. I updated it and scanned for viruses, but didn't find any. Since it was a Pentium III, 1ghz with 256mb RAM, it was a little slow, so I left it running overnight.