So I’m fixing up a two year old Dell Dimension 4400 with Windows XP Home for a co-worker of Christina’s. He’s had it sitting in a closet for most of that two years because his daughter had allowed so much junk to be installed on it that it wasn’t stable any more.
I didn’t hear Christina the other day when she said he wanted it completely wiped with a fresh install. So I downloaded a BootCD system repair package deal and started at it. See, if I booted his computer in its current state it would freak out because it wasn’t online. He had so many trojans and non-such trying to contact someone or something that the system was completely overloaded. And something kept crashing some service and a window would pop up informing me “system shutdown in 60 seconds” a few minutes into every boot. So I tried the BootCD… and ran Ad-Aware. OMGIGE (Oh My God It’s Going to Expload)! Ad-Aware found nearly 300 critical problems. Not just cookies or little minor things… I’m not counting those.
I tried McAfee Anti-Virus next. After 30 minutes… I gave up. The system was so infected with so many different things his system wasn’t ever going to work after everything McAfee was finished cleaning and deleting.
This is where Christina reminds me that he just wanted a wiped and fresh install. YEA!!!!! So I pop in the little Dell Operating System CD (so cute, it’s not labeled Windows XP… it’s labeled “Operating System”) and go through the process of wiping his drive and installing Windows XP clean. It does that pretty smoothly and quickly enough.
But then comes the driver updates, hotfixes, service packs, etc. I left it to its own at the point last night and went to bed. I also left it running smoothly with the latest nVidia graphics drivers.
This morning… I’m looking at 4bit color and it’s throwing fits about the screen resolution. I was able to rollback the driver but come on Microsoft, why did you UPDATE the graphics driver from 2006 to one from 2003? You know better than nVidia? Or me… the current end user?
Of course you do.
Everything is back in order and I’m installing AVG Anti-Virus trial on his system once it finally gets the remaining updates from Microsoft. I’d put Ad-Aware on there too but I’m not sure if he or his family would know when to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to inquiries from Ad-Aware about what it discovers in scans. It really can be a bit confusing some times.
With all of this, again and again I’m reminded, it’s why I love my oh so sweet Mac, even when it’s going on six years now. Imagine running Vista on a six year old PC. Bahaha.
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