Day: October 1, 2005

(Well, yes, I guess I am… ) Surely no one who reads this blog would have this kind of problem…

*sigh* Easy money. It was a small gig but satisfying on a coupla levels.

Let me describe it for you. A naïve user called me. “I think I have a virus or something. Can you help me?” Sure. Why not. Not gonna pay much, but they really were desperate. They’d already had someone “work” on it. Twice. (Second time, they said they didn’t pay ‘em. And I can sympathize. Even agree.) Picked up the comp and the “Oh, here’s all the software that came with it” box of disks (more on that in a sec).

So, what was the problem?
Read more…

Let’s see, un-updated WinXP Home. The comp really was slow. Their user profile was corrupted beyond repair (“beyond repair”—worst I’ve seen, absent a complete Windows crash). 85 trojans or pieces of trojans scattered in various places. 536 pieces of spyware (PLUS a fake anti-spyware program that was itself spyware and was encouraging more infestation).  More than 200 Registry errors that I could find, most concerning malware Norton had ineffectively dealt with.

And it only had 128MB of memory (that’ll make a WinXP computer crawl all by itself!) and had apparently never been defragged.

heh

Oh, and did I mention SP2 had not been installed and it was short 45 other security patches/updates?

Slapped some decent anti-malware software on, let them run sequentially, made manual repairs to various parts of the OS installation, installed all applicable OS updates, etc.

Oh, and I kept the CDR with the pirated copy of MS Office XP. The Setup file was infected with one of the pieces of malware I cleaned off the hard drive…

*sheesh*

Logged all work and returned the thing.

It’ll be a mess again in no time, I’m sure.

At least it was an amusing hour or two.

If this doesn’t leap off the page at you, you’ve just been walking through life not paying attention.

🙂

“Our daily life is mostly, made of cases in which we lose money and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness and good health because of the improbable action of some preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties or harm. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation – or better there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid.”

So writes Carlo M. Cipolla  as he explains the third of his BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY.

Read the whole thing. There will be a test. In fact there will likely be several. Daily. For the rest of your natural born life…

*sigh*

h.t. Jerry Pournelle‘s Current Mail.