A guy who does some rep work for us visited the office. As he came in he spotted me and said “Ah, just the man.” (this generally makes me die a little inside ‘cos it’s usually the precursor to some inane computer problem, but I like the bloke).

“What’s up then?” I enquired.

“My daughter’s laptop has a virus – I’ve got it in the car – can you take a look at it for me?”

I agreed and the laptop was duly presented to me – a pink Dell no less 😐

So I booted it up and OMG…it’s been some time since I’ve seen a computer THAT riddled with malware/viruses. I checked the installed programs list for anti-virus…sure enough ‘Norton’ was installed.

NOTE TO EVERYONE: Norton is a piece of shit code that pretends to be an anti virus program. It is in fact, bloatware and completely useless – it’s the first program I ever cracked.

First job: stop the malware running so I could see some of the screen in front of the pop ups telling me I had 23,000,000 viruses etc., THEN uninstall Norton, reboot install NOD32 and set that scanning…

While that was scanning, I located (I’m REALLY not keen on Vista) the temp folders and internet file folders, created a script to wipe them on logoff (including the index.dat files), checked the registry for rogue startup files – ditto the system32 folder and went for lunch 🙂

Coming back, the scan had found 1 or 2 (ha!) things and corrected everything – I rebooted, checked everything and it was perfect! another great snee job…

Then this morning I got a call: “Paul, every time we try to open a program it pops up with a window saying ‘which program would you like to use for this?'”

I talked him through how to get to the folder options – file types, and add ‘.exe’ as the file type ‘application’ and job done again.

My karma points must be through the roof 🙂