I MUST DOWNLOAD EVERYTHING!!

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

EDIT: I tried fighting the system for 4 hours yesterday, and was making no progress. I GHOSTED HER DRIVE ONTO ANOTHER DRIVE BEFORE NUKING IT. I will be restoring her data. Sorry if that wasn't CLEAR. Geez.

So, user brings her PC in from home because its running terribly slow and nothing but porn sites pop up, even if she isn't "browsing" the web. So, I fire it up in our office, and about 20 minutes later, I can finally see the desktop. But, that's only after everything Yahoo, Myspace, AOL, Google, Verizon, Real, Rhapsody, Ares, eMule, and Windows Messenger ever released gets done loading.

I ran Avast boot-time scan, which found 4 viruses and deleted them, then rna Spybot Search and Destroy and it found 128 infections. It removed them, and thought "ok, should be safe to reboot." Rebooted, same slowness.

I wanted to call her up and tell her that her hard drive had failed and all her data would be lost. Edit: Will restore data files, but I have no easy way to reinstall applications like Office?

If you're going to be that stupid to install every application on the planet; don't expect me to waste hours upon hours reversing your actions. You'll just get a fresh, clean install of XP with all updates and a few free programs from the net (Adobe Reader, Flash, Java, VLC, AIM5.9) preloaded.

Hope you have your CD for Office, and any other application you need.

Comments

[insaint.livejournal.com]

Aren't you getting paid to reverse her actions and give her back a (somewhat) working computer with her data intact?

[irishmasms.livejournal.com]

and then they can charge her again! Fuck it - ignorance is not bliss.

[insaint.livejournal.com]

Sure, but she shouldn't be losing her data because her tech is lazy.

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

I'm not lazy, thanks. Please read the revised post.

[irishmasms.livejournal.com]

and she should not be lazy in learning how to use that tool in front of her to safely navigate that information superhighway she is on.

It also comes down to business - should the tech waste hours trying to clean this mess up, while other projects are waiting; or clean it quick & easy and move onto other projects and customers?

[irishmasms.livejournal.com]

If the end user does not want to learn, you cant force her

[goose-entity.livejournal.com]

but you *can* punish them for their stupidity - like reimaging the machine without taking backups.

After the 4th or 5th iteration of this, the user MAY finally learn something.


... if nothing else, "stop bugging the tech" ;)

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

please read the revised post...

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Not really. In my experience, these users first want you to fix everything while touching nothing, and when the job is done and they're presented with a 6-8 hour bill, they go all defensive and start screaming that you should've nuked the whole thing from the start.

[irishmasms.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, it is easier/cheaper/less time-intensive to Nuke & reload

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

amen.

[kukla-red.livejournal.com]

Exactly! That is the right way to handle it. The OP's attitude is just like smacking a puppy on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. The puppy is hurt but has no idea really what it did wrong.

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

I tried fighting the crap on the computer... I gave up at 8pm last night, ghosted the drive to another drive so I'd have a backup of her data... and started a reload.

[mynameisnotreal.livejournal.com]

I'm with you! I see these things as being near-sentient and me winning over them is something of a rush. I love that moment where you go from fighting an up hill battle to where you know they are still kicking and screaming but the end is inevitable. I win.

[valyazhnaya.livejournal.com]

I knew you were going to post this. :) I agree about the virus hunt; I love it!

[missysedai.livejournal.com]

Wait, let me translate for the people following along at home:

"WAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH! Someone had the NERVE to ask me to do my JOB today! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Christ, no wonder people don't trust tech monkeys.

[brotherflounder]

Glad I'm not the only one who got that impression.

[vulgarcriminal.livejournal.com]

Definitely not. God damn it.

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

please read the edited post.

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

Um. no. Sorry I wasn't more clear. Please read the revised post.

[falnfenix]

wow, dude...at least pull her data off before nuking.

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

I forgot to include that in the post. Please read the revised version.

[mightyj.livejournal.com]

You fix users home PC's? Wow. I won't touch them.

A wise friend of mine told me that when a user asks him to look at their home PC his answer is "I can't do that at work but I run a side business doing it outside of work. I charge $100/hour. When would you like me to look at it?"

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

We charge $60 an hour here. Even though I've spent almost 8 hours on it now, we will probably only charge her for the reload, windows updates, and moving her data back. We won't bill her the time I spent originally trying to remove all the spyware crap. (4 hours)

[blossomingfire.livejournal.com]

I won't touch them either. I don't want the hassle or the liability.

[kukla-red.livejournal.com]

Aren't you getting paid to fix her pc? Who are you to decide that all her data is going away?

You are giving everyone in tech support a black eye.

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

Her data isn't going away... read the post again please.

[kukla-red.livejournal.com]

The edit saying her data was not being deleted was not there when I posted that. Cool your jets.

[gholam.livejournal.com]

The problem is, you can't bill these users for the kind of time it takes to properly fix their problems. They just won't pay, because the bill will run higher than what they originally paid for the whole damn system. So, in effect, no, you aren't getting paid - because they won't pay for anything more sophisticated than nuke & reload.

[vulgarcriminal.livejournal.com]

Jesus.

Start/Run/Msconfig?

Start/Run/Regedit/HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Run & RunOnce mean anything to you?!

Spybot and Avast don't kill things from Run. Not to menton Avast itself is a beast.

UNLEASH THE FURY.

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

lol. post revised.

[vulgarcriminal.livejournal.com]

Comment editing is awesome!

[mouser.livejournal.com]

I'm lucky enough not to have to deal with peoples home machines. I *refuse* most that ask and give *maybe* 30 minutes if I really like them.

Normally, I just send them to the GeekSquad.

[darkmattr.livejournal.com]

hijackthis is your friend.

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I didn't know this. I've used CCleaner before to disable startup items. I found out that she had about four antivirus clients loaded, which was probably a majority of the slowdown issues.

However, Spybot didn't find any more infections, but I was still getting MAD popups. So, I did some digging and found a suggested program: SpyNoMore. So far its found several trojans, masquerading as video codecs.

And, I don't like to use HiJack This... I dunno. Never has much luck. Its great for generating logs, but just haven't used it lately.

Any other things I should check out?

By the way, I finished the clean install and got it all ready to go around 2pm. Now, I'm working with the backup drive, trying to clean it. Depending on my success rate, will determine which drive she gets back.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

And, not only that, um, hello, with all that crap all over it (and removed), a scandisk and defrag should have been pretty high on the agenda. Fragmentation is a bitch.

[snyperwolf.livejournal.com]

Why would you take all the viruses like real player and MSN messenger and replace it with viruses like AIM, Office, and Adobe?

Foxit > Adobe
OpenOffice > Office
Anything > the AIM client