Speaking of tech support...
I posted some tech support jokes a few days ago. I spent Thursday night at a friend's house trying to fix her computer.
The problem, which had been going on for some time, was that the thing had slowed to a crawl. I opened the Task Manager, and the performance tab showed a constant 100% CPU usage. She had an antivirus program, and the Windows firewall, but NO protection from spyware at all.
I installed Spybot, and the scan finished almost an hour later. 419 items found! That's one shy of marijuana! And it crashed trying to fix them all. I tried AdAware next, and it ran better, but still didn't get rid of everything, and still resulted in a crash. When the computer came back on, her anti-virus started popping up warnings.
Basically, the machine was just infested. The problem had been left to fester for so long that there was barely enough processing power left to fix it. I had to go home before I could get it all cleaned out. Reportedly, it's running much faster now.
This should serve as a warning for those of you reading this. Keep your security software up-to-date. Don't let it get that bad.
The problem, which had been going on for some time, was that the thing had slowed to a crawl. I opened the Task Manager, and the performance tab showed a constant 100% CPU usage. She had an antivirus program, and the Windows firewall, but NO protection from spyware at all.
I installed Spybot, and the scan finished almost an hour later. 419 items found! That's one shy of marijuana! And it crashed trying to fix them all. I tried AdAware next, and it ran better, but still didn't get rid of everything, and still resulted in a crash. When the computer came back on, her anti-virus started popping up warnings.
Basically, the machine was just infested. The problem had been left to fester for so long that there was barely enough processing power left to fix it. I had to go home before I could get it all cleaned out. Reportedly, it's running much faster now.
This should serve as a warning for those of you reading this. Keep your security software up-to-date. Don't let it get that bad.