Customer calls, saying that the sound on her PC doesn’t work & she would like to fix it, as her son would like to play some of the games he got for christmas.

She’s got broadband & runs winXP, so this sound like an easy fix sound card drivers, or maybe install new card, & possibly download drivers from the net.

So I take some extra sound cards with me, & when I get there, I see that XP is running very slow, & I’m told the the internet connection stopped working a few days ago. A quick ctrl-alt-del shows that spyware is running rampant, & using 3 different login accounts (each with access permissions, so that each account cannot “spy” on the other) makes eradicating the malware more time-consuming.

I decide to take the PC home & I’m given another PC with a broken power button, & am asked if I can fix it too.

The power button is easy, it lost a spring, but rather than dismantle the button, I open up the PC & swap the power & reset buttons, so the the reset button is now “broken”. This PC Also has Malware, so I clean it up.

The first PC is another story: The son tried to re-install windows XP, but actually installed it onto the recovery partition (with only 5Gb of space, it was running out of space very quickly.).

So I decide to go back to the original XP partition & make that the default boot OS. I then clean up all the spyware, copy some settings from the “new” xp install, install Ewido, ad aware, antivir (http://www.free-av.com/), startup monitor, & do some tuning. I also spend some time explaining that they need to be carefull about what they download & install.