![[H]ard|Forum](/styles/hardforum/xenforo/logo_dark.png){kind=logo}
Negative Decibel
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2005
- Messages
- 3,588
So, I ran into a guy I used to work with, and he remembered me as "the computer guy" from work. He asked me if I could take a look at his computer because it's "got too many errors"...
To make a long story shorter, I have his computer here at my house. It's an HP Pav 533w. I can see brown gunk caked on the fans.
Boots up with to a boot menu with XP pro and XP home. Chose XP pro.. just the administrator account.... passworded. ok, so I try XP home. 8 different users... none of them are passworded. one user, administrator not passworded either. Good place to start...
Windows slowly log on. I lost count of how many popups come up, but it took a while for me to close them all. In fact there were so many that the popups were having trouble popping.
I was greeted by a colorful desktop full of various icons of various, spywware, antivirus, and porn stuff, and other trial offers, His wallpaper is an icon sized picture streatched out to 800*600; after I put all of the icons in a folder, if I squint my eyes and stand a few feet away, I can see that it the picture is a small movie poster of "House of a Flying Daggers."
First things first, I started to grab AVG, and adaware on a thumb drive. While I was doing that, I thought I would run Disk Cleanup, while I was locating the files. I'm not going to break it down into little groups, but there was a total of 4,821,005 KB of wasted space. (OBTW, he has a 40GB HD...) I was thinking about running defrag before I start putting programs on his box, but so far Disk Cleanup is only about 15% of the way done, and it's taken about 20 minutes so far...
While that's running I get a window that tells me that a program it requesting the internet. He has 10 different conetcions to the internet to choose from; five of which are labeled, earthlink, earthlink(2), earthlink(3), etc., etc.....
I'm going to go make dinner for my boys while I wait for Disk Cleanup to finish. I am so tempted to toss in a Ubuntu CD and format the entire thing. what a nightmare...
(To be continued...)
To make a long story shorter, I have his computer here at my house. It's an HP Pav 533w. I can see brown gunk caked on the fans.
Boots up with to a boot menu with XP pro and XP home. Chose XP pro.. just the administrator account.... passworded. ok, so I try XP home. 8 different users... none of them are passworded. one user, administrator not passworded either. Good place to start...
Windows slowly log on. I lost count of how many popups come up, but it took a while for me to close them all. In fact there were so many that the popups were having trouble popping.
I was greeted by a colorful desktop full of various icons of various, spywware, antivirus, and porn stuff, and other trial offers, His wallpaper is an icon sized picture streatched out to 800*600; after I put all of the icons in a folder, if I squint my eyes and stand a few feet away, I can see that it the picture is a small movie poster of "House of a Flying Daggers."
First things first, I started to grab AVG, and adaware on a thumb drive. While I was doing that, I thought I would run Disk Cleanup, while I was locating the files. I'm not going to break it down into little groups, but there was a total of 4,821,005 KB of wasted space. (OBTW, he has a 40GB HD...) I was thinking about running defrag before I start putting programs on his box, but so far Disk Cleanup is only about 15% of the way done, and it's taken about 20 minutes so far...
While that's running I get a window that tells me that a program it requesting the internet. He has 10 different conetcions to the internet to choose from; five of which are labeled, earthlink, earthlink(2), earthlink(3), etc., etc.....
I'm going to go make dinner for my boys while I wait for Disk Cleanup to finish. I am so tempted to toss in a Ubuntu CD and format the entire thing. what a nightmare...
(To be continued...)
