I was asked to look at fixing a very slow vista laptop (and the internet wasn’t working either).

It took about 10 minutes to start, and everything seemed very slow.

task manager showed that it was using 800Mb out of 1000Mb, so that accounts for part of the slowdown.

A look into the processes, showed that nothing was monopolising the CPU, and the disk drive wasn’t busy either.

The obvious first step was to install MalwareBytes, but It gave a few errors and wouldn’t install.

OK, its looking more likely that there is an infection at work here.

I start in safe mode (with networking), and manage to install and (but not update) malwarebytes… hmmm, nasty.

I decide to scan with the slightly outdated malwarebytes, and it finds a few virus and spyware “leftovers” that were skipped by avast.

But that still doesn’t account for the slowness and the lack of internet.

Next, I start the PC “normally”, and take a look at the windows services.

The first thing that grabs my eye, is that the DNS service is not running.

Since DNS is a very important part of using the internet, it shouldn’t be stopped… so I try to start it, and I get the following error:

Error 10107: a system call that should never fail has failed.

So after I stop laughing, I get off the floor, and decide to look at the event log, and see what kind of error messages the systems has been generating.

But starting the event viewer gives another error:

Error 1747: the authentication service is unknown.

Now this is getting really strange.

I take a look through the list of services, only to find that the event log service is not listed in the services list!

At this point, I decide to scan the net for a solution… and I find a remarkably simple solution:

start an administrator command prompt (start -> search for cmd -> right-click -> “run as administrator”

once the command prompt (black box) starts, type:

netsh winsock reset

then reboot the PC.

Amazingly, the PC is now completely back to normal.