Weekend Word - Sunday, Aug 17

I got to the office around 8:15 am again this morning. I had a rather slow one on the bench and it was taking forever to get updated.

Kathy brought breakfast in about 8:30 am from Mickey D's.

We worked on the couple of machines left to finish up, teaming up on the slow one to keep it always updating or rebooting when needed. Since it was so slow (needs more RAM), updates took much longer, so I tended to start them and walk away, coming back in 20-30 minutes to see if it was ready to reboot.

I finalized the notebook with the keyboard and he came to pick it up and the one with the replacement LCD was ready, so the owner came to pick it up. I have another of her's as well to repair, it also needs an LCD, so I will order it Monday and she will pick it up next weekend. I have gotten pretty efficient at LCD replacements and working on notebooks even with my large hands.

A guy came in with a Mac and needed some assistance. Me, being the confident one, give him a half-hour training session on how to use his new Mac. Chris B and Smiley will be proud, I didn't curse it one time, but I did have to reboot it because the Finder kept crashing when reading his Kodak Photo CD and then it wouldn't eject the CD since the files were 'still in use'. Rather than try to kill each process, I found it was easier to have him reboot.

The guy who bought the power supply came back in with the PC. It was running, but it was running Vista, so he couldn't get into it, not knowing the password.

My confidence level high, I told him I could get in. I put it on the bench and booted it up. It came up to a screen waiting on 'Vanessa' to log on. I tried the obvious password of 'password', to no avail. I thought for a second and typed in 'love' and BOOM I was in.

That's right, people, I guessed the password based upon the user's name. Today, I was on top of my game. If I were a swimmer I would be Michael Phelps today. I was almost quicker than Usain Bolt running the 100-meters. Nothing could stop me now.

The guy was astounded. I created him a local administrator account and sent him on his way.

I had a few more PCs come in and I finished them up. One of them, an eMachine, arrived about 4:10 pm. It was getting hot and shutting down. I knew it probably needed a good cleaning. I opened it up and it was packed with gunk. I cleaned it up and suggested to the owner she replace the Bestec Power supply that was in it with a more robust one. She agreed.

I had one more to finish removing some pesky spyware on, so I finished it up and then proceeded to clean this one up, taking the aluminum off the CPU fan and washing it in the sink to removed the caked-on gunk. I applied some of the CPU paste and reassembled everything, adding the new power supply and called the owner to tell her it would be ready in 10 minutes.

She arrived just as I finished scanning it for spyware. Amazingly, I found *nothing* wrong. No malware. Nothing. There is a first time for everything I guess.

After finishing all of that up, I headed for the house about 7 pm.

Weekend Word - Saturday, Aug 16

Since I was coming in early this morning from the Metroplex, I arrived at 8:15 am at the office. No sooner had I gotten there than a lady came in with her PC, needing it looked at.

It looked like it was going to be a busy day, as I received another one to work on shortly after 9 am. I still had the one from last weekend to finish up, a notebook to repair with a new LCD that had just arrived and notebook I had been waiting on a keyboard to replace. That made 5 on the bench and it wasn't even 10 am yet.

I worked my way through them and got most of them done before the end of the day. I had the one with the replacement LCD finished and the notebook with the bad keyboard finished and just needing Windows updates applied, so I left it running overnight upgrading it.

As the day wore on, I got a few more things to troubleshoot, one resulting in a power supply sale for an eMachine that the guy got given to him. He was lucky, as I have an eMachine motherboard graveyard hanging on the wall from bad power supplies. This one was just the power supply. I tested it and it showed bad. I placed a used power supply on the board and the box came up, so he bought the new power supply and was going to put it in by himself. Nowadays it's pretty easy to do that. Most things will only fit one way. Back in the early 90's you pretty much had to know how to wire one up or you would pop a breaker or toast the power supply.

I ran out about 1:00 pm and grabbed a Mini Capt's Mate burger from BnB and came back to the office since I didn't have anyone to keep things open while I ate lunch.

Overall the day was pretty busy. I looked up at 7:00 pm and decided to call it a day. I wanted to get home to watch the Cowboy's preseason game against the Bronco's and the Phantastic Phelps Pheat of winning 8 gold medals at the Olympics, so I hurried home, grabbing a quick dinner at the K-N Root Beer to eat when I got home.

I watched the first quarter and some of the second and then turned over to watch the Olympics and don't recall anything else until about 1:00 am when I woke up, missing the rest of the Cowboy game and the record-breaking 8th win for Phelps. I will have to catch both on replay.

Weekend Work - Sunday, Aug 10

As usual, Kathy opened the office up first thing and worked on updating the two PCs that were left to complete from last night.

I arrived around 11 am and finished those two machines up, one a Vista machine and one an XP box.

Sunday's can be quiet for PC repair. Today wasn't much different.

I contacted the contractor and told him to move forward on the bathroom. It was going to cost much more than I wanted to spend, but the work he was planning was going to make the place look great.

He came in and we discussed paint colors, choice of tile for the shower and choice of tile for the floor. I think it will look great when it is done.

Kathy left around 2:00 pm to go clean out the bathroom at the lake house and I finished up the two PCs. The customers came in and picked them up. I used the time to wrap up things I have been meaning to get done for a few weeks around the office.

Around 3:00 pm a customer dropped off an older Dell GX1 that needed cleaning up. I explained it would be next weekend before it was completed because I wasn't going to have time to finish it today.

At 4:00 pm I closed up the shop and headed to the lake. I have to be at the office in downtown Fort Worth at midnight to upgrade a server, so I wanted to make sure we got away as soon as possible to get home in time.

Weekend Work - Saturday, Aug 9

After my debacle this morning at the local McDonald's, I arrived at the office at just about 9:00 am. When I opened the door, I noticed a hint of what smelled like a decomposing body.

I immediately tried to open the door and air the place out while I looked for the source of the odor. I found it just behind the printer on the sticky mat I laid out for him, a little mouse.

Cycle back about a year.

I came in one Saturday to find the lid on the mixed nuts can had been nibbled into by a mouse. I immediately placed glue traps out and hoped to snag him. I did. And his brother the next month.

I kept the traps out just in case his relatives sent out a search party. Well, they must have, cause I got another one sometime this week.

I disposed of the carcass and opened the front door.

No sooner had I done that than a customer walked him with his PC. I explained the situation and apologized. I was embarrassed that the mouse got in, despite trying to plug every possible entryway.

I started working on his PC when another one came in for repair. The customer felt compelled to stay and talk, preventing me from starting on either one as soon as I wanted to.

Soon after he left I started working on both of them and then hung the new OPEN sign we picked up at Home Depot this week.

Kathy came in and I had planned to meet a contractor to look at redoing my bathroom at the lake, so I called him and asked if he would come by and I would take him out there. He arrived within minutes and we left to go do that.

When I arrived back, there were two additional PCs on the bench to repair.

I ordered up a couple of personal pan pizzas from Pizza Hut after giving the assistant manager a good chewing out about the dining experience there a few weeks back. He apologized and took the order, giving me 10% off. I asked for delivery and it arrived hot and on time.

Jason came by and invited us out to see his new project in action. I hesitate to describe if here, I think he is keeping it under wraps for the Briar Creek Bash. They were also going to grill up some chicken and shrimp, so Kathy offered to make some dessert and a salad.

She left to go do that while I worked on the four PCs on the bench, finishing two of them up just as the customers arrived to pick them up.

I concentrated on the other two, removing some spyware and a few viruses. Despite having an anti-virus application and a spyware-removal tool installed, they were infected. It could be that they were infected first and the AV and anti-spyware client was an effort to get the machine back to a usable status.

At any rate, one of them was really bad while the other was only mildly annoying to resolve.

I left the office about 6:30 pm and headed to the Bryan's. I made sure to put some money aside, since I knew they would probably want to play some 31 and I intended on taking their money this time.

If only Shawn were here so I could take his too.

When fast food isn't

My Saturday routine usually consists of me awaking about 7:30-7:45 am, geting in the shower and then heading into town. I open the office at 9:00 am, so this gives me plenty of time.

Most of the time I like to grab breakfast at one of the fast-food type local establishments, be it the McDonald's, the What-A-Burger or the local Donut shop.

This morning I arrived at the McDonald's and got in line at the drive thru. It was 8:30 am and the line was around the building. There were no parking places on the South side of the building except for the blue ones, so I thought it was best I just waited in line instead of going inside.

At that time a spot opened up in the parking lot and I peered into the building and saw only three people in line. Surely this would be faster than waiting in line and wasting fuel, so I parked and went inside.

My mistake.

As I watched the chaos and seemingly unmanaged group try and fill the drive-thru orders and the counter orders, I knew this wasn't going to be fast.

I never dreamed it would take as long as it did.

I got to the register and waited. There was no one there to take the order. Since I was pressed for time, needing to open by 9:00 am, I was getting a little concerned. A youngster walked up and asked if I minded he cut in front of me. I told him, politely, that I did.

The counter person finally arrived and I placed my order. It was a simple one, a small order of Sausage Gravy and Biscuits and a regular, non-flavored iced coffee. To Go. Nothing complicated about it.

After placing my order, I stepped back and let others attempt to get their order placed while I could hear the chaos from the back of the house ensuing.

At one point a blue-shirted lady came out and told the crew member on the window to '...park 'em...' if they didn't have their food ready. This was an effort to clear the drive thru line, which continued to stretch around the building.

I looked at my watch. It was now 8:45 am and I was still waiting on my food. In fact, the three people ahead of me were still waiting on *their* food. I had already paid my $4.10, but I was considering leaving and calling back later to complain since my office opening time was only 15 minutes away and I was at least 7 minutes by car away.

About 8:50 am the first of the three people got their food. There was a glimmer of hope.

I glanced up and noticed the customer service toll-free number and dialed it so I would have it in my phone. I knew I was going to need it.

About 8:54 am the person right ahead of me got their order. Perhaps, if they hurried, I could make it to the office on time (a pet peeve of mine).

Hope was fading faster than a unwatered flower in this August heat.

At 8:57 am I saw them push the familar Sausage Gravy and Biscuit box out to a tray, ready to be delivered. They still had not created my drink, so they started working on that. The moment it hit the tray (despite having asked for it TO GO and expecting it in a bag), I grabbed both and headed for the car. I didn't even get a spork, and there were non available at the area set aside for napkins and other accessories. Twenty-eight minutes after pulling into the parking lot I finally had my order.

28 minutes. At a fast food joint. Probably the fastest fast food franchise in the world.

I was going to be late and I was pretty upset about it.

Having complained about this McDonald's in the past, I don't know that calling the customer service line will do any good. I decided I was going to call and air my grievances with them as well as formulating a nice Letter to the Editor of the local paper expressing my complaints and encouraging others who have had similar issues to speak up.

I figure that one voice on the other end of the phone line doesn't do much good. But, perhaps if I embarrass them by voicing my concerns in writing, on this blog and in the local paper, it will make them re-evaluate their need to bring strong leadership to the store.

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.

Grillin' with the Bryan's

David and Sarah stopped by this morning and invited Kathy and I out for dinner. They were going to grill up some burgers and sausages. And, their grandson, Shawn, had $5 burning a hole in his pocket and he wanted to play some 31 to possibly win some money.

I left the office around 6:15 pm and arrived there about 6:30 pm to find everyone sitting outside talking. Even though it was over 100°F at the time, the shade and breeze flowing across David's front yard made it quite pleasant.

Kathy had made some Jalapeno Corn Casserole as a side item for the burgers and 'dogs and a Gingerbread cake for dessert.

David cooked up a bunch of sausages of every variety, from plain beef to pork, jalapeno and cheese and some sausages from the meat market in Windthorst. Of course, he had some grilled fresh jalapeno's that brought tears to his eyes and some delicious burgers.

We sat down and ate and watched with amusement when Zach ate everything put in front of him. He really got after the Gingerbread cake with the whipped cream topping. It is quite a fun site to see him put away the groceries. He is such a happy, healthy baby after having a rough time of it when he was born.

After we ate, I played a few round of 'Gone Fishing' on Sarah's touchscreen bartop game. It is pretty cool and I could see how one could spend hours playing it. I have been planning on building one to compliment my MAME machine, maybe I need to really get cracking now.

We sat back outside for a while as Jason worked on his top-secret 'device' to unveil at the Briar Creek Bash in October. We decided to go in an play some 31.

Kathy went home to let the dog out of the 'prison camp' while I stayed to take Shawn's money in 31. We anted up $5 each and proceeded to play. As we worked to eliminate people, it got down to Shawn, Jason and myself. Jason dealt a hand and immediately knocked. I had an ace in my hand, so I knew it was over for me. Shawn dropped a 21 on the table and Jason had 26, eliminating me.

The next hand, Jason and Shawn were at it and the anticipation grew as Shawn and Jason kept drawing cards. Eventually one of them knocked and when the dust settled, Jason had a 28 while Shawn was left holding a 26, not good enough and he was eliminated, leaving Jason to claim the pot.

So, even though I didn't take Shawn's money, which was a goal at the beginning of the night, it was fun to watch Jason take it from him. And, with Zach eating like he does, he might need it.

They started another game, but I had to get home and get some shut eye. I left three machines on the bench in various stages of repair and I had a 10:00 am service call to perform. If I didn't get up early and get in there, I might not finish things in a timely manner.

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.

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.