Not my usual line of work
By trade I'm a web developer. To those not in the know, I write code. Usually the sort of code that never gets seen or thought about - when you pay for something with a credit card, when you add a product to your basket or even login to a site, the "magic" behind all of that is written by me. While I do venture into design on a small scale, I'm no Picasso (or am I? Everything I design is certainly "abstract"!)
This job today was one of those "you know about computers right?" jobs. People who work in IT get them all the time. The assumption that if you work on a computer in any technical capacity, you can "do computers". Well, it just so happens, I can - sort of. I built my first PC when I was 8 (with some help - but I did it!) and have never owned a desktop machine I didn't build myself. I've spent countless hours cursing one part or another, or usually the case - cases used to be lethal things, all sharp edges designed to shred fingers. Today's job was a PC that "didn't work".
Diagnosis PC
The only clue I had was that it "turned itself off sometimes". Now, I booted the machine up which went smoothly (after I dug around for a spare mouse and keyboard) and while I couldn't say it was running well, it was at least running. I figured give it 10 minutes, see what it does. Nothing. It sat there, with obvious issues but stable. Those issues?
Three anti-virus scanners, the most reputable of which was Norton - practically a virus in itself. Never install more than one virus scanner, they interfere with each other, they read each other's library of viruses and see them as viruses, they don't play well together. If you want a good anti-virus I can recommend AVG, Avira (my personal pick), Kaspersky or ESET's NOD32. But pick ONE!
The other problem, over 60 active icons in the system tray, none of which were responding. Turns out this is a bug in Windows 7 (and possibly other versions) which required ending the explorer.exe task and then editing the registry (not for the faint hearted) before restarting explorer.exe. One problem down.
Not wanting to upset the owner, who had obviously paid good money for Norton, I decided to leave it on. I know... but it's not worth the argument, I'll just tell them not to pay for it again. I opted to remove the other 2. One was simple, disable Windows Defender (more a malware checker than anti-virus but it tries). The next was a particularly vicious bugger called One System Care, tells you your system has 100's of errors and only they can fix it with the full version, available for... [insert dollar amount here]. Does it want to uninstall, does it b*****ks. Some jiggery-pokery and judicious restarts later and all mention of the little swine is removed.
So, the virus software is sorted, the system tray is working and the system seems stable after multiple restarts. All that was left was to run my usual raft of checks before handing it back to the owner. This amounted to running Trend Micro's portable virus checker software, not perfect but I trust it far more than Norton, followed by Spyware Search & Destroy to eliminate any malware around. Both came up clean (other than the usual cookies/temp files etc) and so "job's a good'un".
Source
So is it all fixed?
I'm pretty sure it is but I just (while writing this post) found out the owner is now on holiday (how dare he!). I'll be handing the system over, along with a handful of advice on anti-virus software and get them to see if they can break it - different people use systems differently (i.e. wrongly!). I'll keep you posted!
Signature incoming - looking for artists to do something funky!