Weekend Work - Saturday, August 2

I worked on the teenager's notebook first thing, finishing it up.

Windows XP SP3 had installed overnight and the virus scan had only found 4 infections, which it removed. Since the malware was now gone and the final updates were complete, I put it aside and concentrated on finishing the corporate desktop I had replaced the mainboard on last evening.

Like the notebook, I had installed SP3 on it [the desktop] and virus scanned it over night. A few more updates and it would be ready to go.

David and Sarah stopped by and invited Kathy and I out for dinner and a game of 31. I told them we would see them there.

My weekly visit from Chris occurred about mid-morning. I enjoy visiting with him, even though most of the time I am shuffling back and forth between the two work benches working on multiple PCs. He had a couple of leads on employment and will be following up on those. He is in a tough situation. His career of choice, being a writer, is rather limited in Graham.

I offered up some suggestions on freelance work and he has a couple of ideas that could pay off big dividends. I wish him well.

My cousin, Roy, came in with a customer who brought in an HP notebook that had some slowness issues. He [the customer] said it was slow and the USB mouse wouldn't work. I also noticed a rattle when I moved the notebook from side to side. It looked like I was going to have to open this one up to see what was loose.

I told them I would have it ready by tomorrow.

A lady last week called and wanted to drop off her Dell desktop. She said it was soo infected, it took it 20 minutes to start up. I welcome those type of challenges.

She dropped it off on the way to 'drown the grandkids' at the lake.

I put it on the bench and started working on it. I was just finishing up the corporate desktop on one bench and was looking at the HP notebook on the back bench, so I had three of them going.

I immediately realized this one didn't even have Service Pack 1 installed (Windows XP). No wonder it was infected. It also had no AV protection whatsoever. I started up my custom-written spyware removal scripts and found several hundred issues. I cleaned them up and concentrated on scanning for viruses using a portable AV package that is freely available.

Even though I had removed all of the spyware, there were over 117 active viruses on the machine. I tried a reinstall/upgrade to get to SP2, hoping it would replace the infected files.

It didn't.

I popped in my flash drive and scanned again, leaving it to go the rest of the night in a deep, thorough scan.

A guy dropped by with a Dell notebook. He said it was acting funny after installing Dazzle. I don't like to immediately jump on the malware bandwagon, but when we fired it up and it took over 15 minutes to complete the boot process, I knew something was amiss.

He had scanned for spyware and had ThreatFire and Spyware Doctor installed as well as Registry Mechanic running. The corner of the plastic bezel was damaged and needed to be replaced. I made a note of that on the repair form for reference.

I received a call from someone needing a service call tomorrow at 10 am to set up DSL. I collected the info and told them I would be there at 10 am sharp.

Back to the Dell with the damaged bezel.

The systray looked like a gathering place for icons. There were at least 15 icons in the tray, mostly junk that is unnecessary. I told him I could optimize it and asked how much RAM he had. He stated 2GiB.

I was surprised by this, since the drive was being totally trashed spooling to the pagefile. He left it with me and I started working on it as well as the other three machines.

I finished up the corporate Dell desktop and put it aside to concentrate on the two notebooks and the other desktop.

Another issue with the bezel-damaged notebook was the Automatic Update service would not function. I pulled out my trusty script to unregister and register all of the DLLs for Windows Update and ran it, only to find BITS was dorked. I grabbed the support tools and fixed BITS and proceeded to optimize the startup files, pagefile and scan the machine, again, for malware, finding one reference to it.

I removed the malware and cleaned the registry. At this point all I needed to do was apply all of the missing Windows Updates since AU was broken for some time.

While this was going on, I had determined the cause of the rattle in the HP was a CD that had slipped between the top of the CD-ROM drive and the case.

Of course, I had the thing almost completely apart when I found it. That's my luck.

I glanced at the clock and it was nearly 6:15 pm. I had to rush off to the Bryan's for dinner, meeting Kathy there.

With the HP notebook, the severely-infected Dell desktop and the battle-damaged Dell notebook all on the work bench and a mid-morning service call looming, I would have to get to the office early tomorrow to wrap all of this up.