Remember...
Enough shovels of earth a mountain...
Enough pails of water a river.
Master Chen Hai Yang
I've been given a computer to free up some space on and instead of it being a simple task it has turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. For a start, the computer is riddled with trojans and sypware. One particular program, WinFix 2006, has been a real headache to remove. I've installed my two favourite cleaners, Spybot Search and Destroy and Spyware Doctor, and though they've both cleaned the computer a couple of times, the problems are still there the next time I run them. The computer is running Windows 98 and is so slow. My first recommendation will be to buy some more RAM.
The second big problem was that the CDROM drive won't work. I've tried everything to get it to read a disk, even getting in the box and re-inserting all the cables. Windows says there's no problems but the drive is not recognising any disk I put into it, and it freezes up the computer. I was hoping that when I got rid of all the crap, it might work properly, but no such luck. My next option was to hook up my laptop with a network cable. Because the laptop is running XP there was a few problems just viewing the other computer, but much fiddling with settings and I got this working okay. I was able to insert the CD with all the cleaners on the laptop, share the drive, and could then install on the 98 machine.
After running Spyware Doctor in safe mode (yet again), and discovering another 82 infections when I thought there were none, I think I've finally cleaned the computer of all the nasties. The original problem was to free up some disk space. I tried compressing the drives, there's a logical drive too, or perhaps I should just merge the two partitions, because nothing is installed on the drive. There's 1g of space and it would do better to be on the C drive. That means installing another product on an already full disk.
Okay, I've installed Partition Magic and AVG Free. No antivirus software is installed!! I don't know how many times I come across this when fixing people's computers. It's no wonder their computers are sluggish and full of spyware. Anyway, the partitions are merging as I write, and then the last thing to do will be to update all the software I've installed. Which means hooking the machine up to my main computer, because I can't get past the laptop in the network.
All this work for two bottles of Chardonnay! Let's hope it's a nice drop.
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