Day off? Hardly

So, today was supposed to be my day off. I was supposed to try and get quotes from people to redo my bathroom. I want to remove the tub and replace it with a good shower. And, I was going to ride my motorcycle. So much for those ideas.

I came in to town around 10:30 and did a few things and then went to lunch at Burger's and Billiards. It was about 12:50 pm and the place was packed.

When I walked in, Bucket was on the phone taking an order. As soon as she hung up, she said '...Mr Computerman, I ain't got no ham....' knowing I was there for the Mini Captain's Mate burger.

Shaking my head, I ordered up a Mini Bacon Cheeseburger and a side of onion rings with a 50/50 Tea. This is a trend I have gotten into lately where I get half a glass of unsweet tea and half a glass of sweet tea. It adds just enough sweetness to it to make it good without too many calories or grams of sugar.

As I ate my lunch I listened to ex-county commissioner, Sam Whittenburg, wheelin' and a dealin' with someone on the phone. I wasn't *trying* to listen in, but Sam has a deep, very distinctive voice that travels well. If you know Sam or have ever heard him, you can't mistake his voice.

When I finished I headed back to the shop and proceeded to flash a new ROM to my ATT 8525 phone. I had done this a few days ago, but was never able to pair it with my car. I have a car with the UConnect hands-free feature and the phone has worked in the past. I backed everything up, flashed a different version of the ROM on it and then restored the info (contacts, calendar, etc). When I tried to pair it this time, it worked flawlessly. You don't realize how much you like hands-free phone usage in the car until it doesn't work.

About 3:00 pm someone knocked on the office door. Since I wasn't officially open, I had the mini-blinds closed to keep out all of the heat I could. With forecasted temps in the 105-107°F range today, every little bit helps.

When I opened the door, there was Schulyer with his notebook in tow.

I had walked him through a spyware issue over the phone on Tuesday, but I knew he would be coming by since complete removal of spyware is something one really has to work at. It is rare for a novice user to be able to remove everything.

Sure, you can download a few tools to remove it, but unless you remove *everything* and every reference to it, the spyware will continue to haunt you. Hey to the Geek Squad. I have cleaned up after those guys on more than one occassion.

As I suspected, that's what was happening to Schuyler's notebook. He removed the major threats, but there were some hanging around that kept re-infecting him.

I took the notebook and started working on it. He had a few tough ones on there, but once I tracked them down, I was able to remove them and all references to them. I performed a virus scan and found the culprit that started it all in his My Documents folder. I moved it to the quarantine area and then deleted it.

While I had his machine on the bench, I figured I might as well work on two more I had there as well. One of them was a company's desktop that was 'dead' and the other was a notebook that belonged to a teenager and I knew it would be infected pretty badly.

I diagnosed the desktop with a bad motherboard. It was a Compaq mini-tower. As luck would have it, I had a replacement board and it fit in the case. I talked to the company representative and we determined it would be more cost effective to repair this one than buy a new PC since they required XP Professional for their custom software.

They had the license for XP, but figured that waiting on a new Dell and then removing Vista and putting XP on the new Dell was more expensive, in the long run, than repairing this one. And, they could get this one back this weekend. Try doing that mailorder. Fu-get-about-it. Ain't gonna happen. Besides, I was pretty sure I could repair/install XP and not loose any data.

And, that's just what I did.

I put the new board it and popped their XP CD in and proceeded to boot up and perform a repair/install. Everything worked great except we could not authenticate because their domain controller was not there and no one knew the local admin password.

I fired up a custom-built CD with some scripts I had cobbled together and reset the password to a known one for the local account, rebooted, logged in and installed all of the necessary drivers to get the PC on the network.

From there I applied Windows XP SP3 and all of the updates and then left it scanning overnight for viruses and other malware.

The teenagers notebook was just as I expected. It was riddled with malware, including 4 viruses. I guess they never updated their AV defs. I removed the malware and left it scanning for viruses overnight as well.

Schuyler came by and picked up his notebook on his way to do a late evening service call. Oh, the life of a plumber/electrician/AC man. Kinda like a computer-repair man, always busy and working at all hours of the nights or weekends.

By this time Kathy had arrived and we headed to the house. Luckily it was going to be cool inside since I had left the AC running (in power save mode) when I left the house this morning. Some Friday evenings during the summer we arrive to a house that's over 100°F at 9:00 pm and it is stifling for the first 20 minutes.

The house faces the West and soaks up all of the sunshine. I think the lake amplifies it even more since there are no trees to shade the sun from naking the house.

We ordered up some custom-fit solar screens, but they where too large to get 'in' the car when I came down on Thursday night. I could have probably strapped them on top, but opted to ask my buddy Jason to bring them by when he arrives this weekend.

Once we get those installed it should help with the heat in the house late in the day.