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Entry tags:
the good, the bad, and the ugly
We'll start with the ugly and work our way up:
It was a laptop belonging to one of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derien's cousins. The diagnosis was it won't do anything.
That wasn't entirely true. It was powering up and reading the hard drive, but I couldn't get a clean boot in regular or safe mode. It took quite a while to figure out what was really going on. Doesn't it always? First the thing was loaded with spyware and malware. Second windows explorer would not load. Yes, that means I had no desktop, no control panel, not much of anything to work with really.
The first thing I had to do was create a CD to boot from and change the Admin password. Then I went about cleaning things out of the registry in safe mode through task manager and regedit. Task manager was the only window that I could get to open. Every time I thought I had all the spyware off I'd reboot and it would start spawning again. Finally after much deleting in the registry I managed to remove enough of the offending items so they couldn't reproduce.
Then I began to look at the real problem, explorer was hosed. If I tried to run it, it died with unable to load all the required programs. I tried to replace DLLs. But that didn't change the behavior. I tried repairing using the install CD, that was a joke. I tried reinstalling over the existing installation. Why do they even offer that option?
So in an act of final resignation today I gave in to what would have saved me all the trouble of last night...
For the bad: I'm now reformatting the bloody thing and putting win 2K on it. *cringe* Bless me father, for I -have- sinned.
And the good: The fact that I could sit and work on something for seven hours at a stretch without hardly moving shows I'm back to my old self. Yesterday I also did things like housework, loaded more ebooks on the readers, and caught up on emails. In short, I did more yesterday than in the whole month of November.
But where did my long weekend go?
It was a laptop belonging to one of
derien's cousins. The diagnosis was it won't do anything.That wasn't entirely true. It was powering up and reading the hard drive, but I couldn't get a clean boot in regular or safe mode. It took quite a while to figure out what was really going on. Doesn't it always? First the thing was loaded with spyware and malware. Second windows explorer would not load. Yes, that means I had no desktop, no control panel, not much of anything to work with really.
The first thing I had to do was create a CD to boot from and change the Admin password. Then I went about cleaning things out of the registry in safe mode through task manager and regedit. Task manager was the only window that I could get to open. Every time I thought I had all the spyware off I'd reboot and it would start spawning again. Finally after much deleting in the registry I managed to remove enough of the offending items so they couldn't reproduce.
Then I began to look at the real problem, explorer was hosed. If I tried to run it, it died with unable to load all the required programs. I tried to replace DLLs. But that didn't change the behavior. I tried repairing using the install CD, that was a joke. I tried reinstalling over the existing installation. Why do they even offer that option?
So in an act of final resignation today I gave in to what would have saved me all the trouble of last night...
For the bad: I'm now reformatting the bloody thing and putting win 2K on it. *cringe* Bless me father, for I -have- sinned.
And the good: The fact that I could sit and work on something for seven hours at a stretch without hardly moving shows I'm back to my old self. Yesterday I also did things like housework, loaded more ebooks on the readers, and caught up on emails. In short, I did more yesterday than in the whole month of November.
But where did my long weekend go?