For the second time in a week, I find myself repairing someone’s laptop.<\/p>\n

The first laptop was Mom’s, which was absolutely ravaged with those awful “fake antivirus” viruses. I ran Malwarebytes, which removed 28 infections … then I rebooted, ran it again, and it removed another 18. I was still getting pop-ups, so I then switched to Ad-Aware. Then Spy-Bot. Each program I ran found another 20 or so infected files. TrendMicro’s House Call, a web based scanner, found another 59 infections. Even with all the infections seemingly gone, Internet Explorer was still acting wonky by redirecting Google results to malware sites, and I never could get Windows Update to run. They sure don’t write viruses like they used to. What sucks is, she was even running antivirus when she got infected! After confirming that Mom had backed up her files elsewhere, it was lights out for that laptop. Two hours after that decision was made, Mom got a free upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. Game, set, match.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, work began on Andy’s laptop. Andy had sent me a cell phone picture he had taken of his laptop sitting at the BIOS screen and had added the word “Yikes!” When I began looking at it, the laptop would get to the Windows splash screen, blue screen, and then reboot. That’s usually a sign of either a bad or corrupted driver, or hard drive failure. I booted the laptop using an old Winternal ERD boot CD in hopes of copying off the data, but found I couldn’t access the hard drive at all. Yikes, indeed. I ended up running chkdsk \/r twice (the first time found so many errors it timed out) and was finally able to access the drive. I don’t trust this hard drive and since I know Andy has every family picture he owns stored on it, I am currently making an (encrypted) image of it and storing it in my closet. If he never needs it, no harm no foul.<\/p>\n

Working on laptops is so much easier than the old days of working on towers. Before the days of KVMs, I would have to drag a monitor, keyboard and mouse out of the closet or garage and clean off a space to work for a few days. Laptops are so much more convenient. For example, don’t tell Andy, but his is currently perched on top of a glass of Kool-Aid at the moment …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the second time in a week, I find myself repairing someone’s laptop. The first laptop was Mom’s, which was absolutely ravaged with those awful “fake antivirus” viruses. I ran Malwarebytes, which removed 28 infections … then I rebooted, ran it again, and it removed another 18. I was still getting pop-ups, so I then switched to Ad-Aware. Then Spy-Bot. Each program I ran found another 20 or so infected files. TrendMicro’s House Call, a web based scanner, found another 59 infections. Even with all the infections seemingly gone, Internet Explorer was still acting wonky by redirecting Google results to… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3367\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}