Weekend Work - Sunday, August 3

Since I knew I had three to finish this morning and a service call, I arrived at 7:45 am and started working on the Dell notebook with the broken screen.

Having fixed Windows Updates last evening, I applied all of the updates and made sure it was still running well and all malware was gone.

I scanned the Dell desktop and found some additional viruses. I contacted the owner to let them know it would probably be best to completely reinstall from the ground up since a large number of system files were infected with the virus that replicated itself over 100 times.

The owner was out of the house and would call back later. I set the Dell desktop aside and wrapped up the HP just before heading to the service call.

Kathy contacted the owner, but he was at church and would be back later.

I headed out for the service call and arrived to find the owner didn't have their DSL provisioned yet. I hooked everything up, but the DSL light was flashing red, and indication that DSL sync wasn't occurring. I confirmed all of the cables were right and the filters applied appropriately.

When I turned on the desktop, it started booting and hung going into Windows. I powered it down and started it up again. This time it tried to perform a scandisk, but hung at the 10-second countdown.

The owner reported this is the first time this has occurred. I started it up in safe mode, but it would not start in normal mode. This led me to question if they had added any software or hardware lately. As I suspected, they had added a network card a day or so ago.

The guy who added the card, a local guy named Jimmy, offered to remove it. He had pulled it from a junker PC he salvaged. He claimed it was working before.

He pulled the card and I started up the PC and it worked fine. He had another card, so he jumped on his gas-powered bicycle and headed out to get it.

Suspecting the card might be bad or possibly the slot it was occupying was bad, I moved it to another slot and turned on the PC. It worked the first time. I shut it down, replaced the cover and brought it back up again. I fired up Internet Explorer and connected to the local Motorola DSL modem and confirmed the network card was working correctly.

Since DSL wasn't turned on yet, we couldn't complete the network setup. I had everything ready to go, we were simply waiting on the DSL sync to occur.

After about 15 minutes of explaining how to network two PCs and who to use the scanner, I headed back to the office.

The virus scan on the Dell found 117 total viruses. Since some of the files were system files and I was waiting on the owner for direction on reformatting and reinstalling, I applied SP3 to see if it would replace the formerly infected, no missing, files.

It did not.

The owner of the HP and the Dell notebook with the damaged screen came by and picked them up. I explained the work and they both seemed happy with the results.

A guy stopped by and was talking about his notebook being slow. We discussed what might be causing it and I offered that I could correct these issues rather easily. He said he might bring it in this coming weekend, but wanted to warn me if had some pr0n on it and wanted to know if I was offended by pr0n. I told him no. He said he felt compelled to ask because some people get offended by it.

The owner of the Dell desktop called and said she didn't have any data on the drive that was important, so reformatting would be acceptable.

I backed up what I could on the PC and started reinstalling Windows XP.

A county employee stopped by about flash drive issues. She was using a flash drive as her only source of data for Quickbooks and now it appeared the flash drive was dead. I explained that while flash drives are normally dependable, like any electronic component, they can and do go bad. I explained they should be used as a backup solution, and maybe not the only solution if your data is important.

I handed her my business card and told her about Carbonite and explained it was available as a link on my web site.

I finished up the Dell desktop and contacted the owner, but she was unable to come pick it up at the moment as they had company over.

I headed home and put up solar screens to knock down some of the heat and slept a few hours before heading home.