Everything is Permuted

Every now and again I get a call from a friend wanting help with their PC. Usually the machine's doing something odd, not booting, or is generally 'broken' in some way. I'm no expert and would never claim to be, but I've been playing around with PCs since the late 80s and so have picked up a fair amount of useful information and am confident enough to dig around if necessary. I also keep in mind that it's pretty hard actually to break a PC.

Anyway, yesterday I got a call. Boot failure. The machine (running Windows ME) was cycling through boot-up until just before the desktop loads. Then.... zilch... nothing... black screen. Grabbed my toolkit (a CD with a few goodies on it) and went round to take a look. Sure enough, it wouldn't boot. And, yes, I'd like a cup of tea, "milk no sugar" (I really like that bit... gives me a few minutes to work alone). So left alone, I rebooted (successfully) in Safe Mode, did a System Restore to a couple of months back and hit restart. By the time the tea was ready, the machine was back up. I just love that moment, that feeling of success.

So that's taken 10 minutes (max). The next stage took rather longer (it always does). First off I had a quick look round the system. Norton AV wildly out of date, but a decent firewall installed. (I was thankful for that, though it came back to haunt me later on). Nothing too obvious or nasty running in processes. OK, down to spring cleaning...

Step 1: Copy over F-PROT for DOS anti-virus from my toolkit. This is a great utility, as it'll run on nothing. I'd updated the definitions before I set out (download and drag the relevant files into the zip), so I was bang up to speed. Run it. It found a few things, but to be honest not too much. I've seen machines with hundreds of virii all over them. This one was pretty clean. Took about half an hour to do its stuff.

Step 2: Copy over Ad-Aware. Install, and check for updates. (I love the fact that everyone's on broadband these days.) Run it. Several rogue diallers showed up, plus various bits of spyware. Again, far from the worst I've seen, but certainly not ideal.

Step 3: Reboot and see if everything is still working. (It is.)

Step 4: Windows update. It was switched off... Ran it manually and picked up about 24 critical updates. That took a while even with broadband. Reboot. Still fine.

Step 5: Try the Norton AV live update. Won't connect... arrgh.

Step 6: Uninstall Norton AV.

Step 7: Install AVG Free Edition from my toolkit. Try and update the definitions. No luck. Double arrgh.... (arrgh!)

Step 8: Have a cigarette. (Cough)

Step 9: Wasn't there a firewall on here somewhere? Dig around in Sygate and discover it's pretty tightly locked down. In my mind, too tightly locked down. Take a deep breath, because at this stage I don't really know what I'm doing (have never seen Sygate before) and disable some functions that look odd, set some others to 'ask' and enable some core Windows services. This was deeply unscientific, but I was reasonably cautious so I don't expect major problems. Main thing is that it did the trick and AVG updated. I didn't have time to check whether the automatic update will work in the future, but it always has in the past when I've installed it and March 2005 defs are going to be somewhat better than a list dating back to 2001

Step 10: Add a new Restore Point clearly labeled as 'After Clean up and update THIS ONE WORKS.'

Done!

At least I hope so. Inevitably having played about with the system to a moderate extent there might be quirks or changes in how the machine behaves. So with suitable words of warning, and an invitation to call me if anything goes pear-shaped, I beat a retreat. I realize there's more I could've done (like install Opera, run Spybot, turn off unnecessary services etc...), but I'll keep those for next time.

I quite enjoyed myself