A game of “I Spy”
So far my Christmas vacation has been spent repairing computers. My mother had a truly awful hard drive crash. Every trick I had up my sleeve (e.g. mounting the drive under Linux) failed. Files were lost. It was a little time consuming rebuilding the OS, but it wasn’t a hard effort. Thanks to Microsoft’s security holes, I downloaded about 100 Mb of PATCHES after re-installing XP and Office. How does anyone without broadband stomach that?
The truly interesting repair job was a computer that belonged to my wife’s friend. The family had a six year old 333Mz Gateway that was very sluggish and frequently it would lock up. After logging in, the hard drive would thrash for about five minutes before the computer was responsive enough that you could click on an icon. If my daughters’ 300Mz machine ever gets this bad, I’ll just give it away. It is sometimes just not worth the hassle.
But for others, I’ll give it a shot. Without the original Windows98 CD, I attempted to excise its daemons without a fresh re-install. I examined the programs referenced by the registry, the startup menu, and those loaded into memory after logging in. For each program I had to search the web for whether it was a “friendly” or not. It was a mess. Some of those were stubborn suckers to remove.
Countless sarc searches and computer reboots later, all was better. It runs faster and doesn’t hang. Her computer had, not one, not two, but seventeen different spyware/trojans installed. I was amazed.