Ever since I’d purchased my main computer back at the end of 2008 I hadn’t been able to set up a home network between my computer and my wife’s computer. And when I would turn on the laptop, I couldn’t access anything either.

I kept going through the same process that Microsoft tells everyone, which is to go through the Control Panel to the Network & Sharing Center, click on setting up a new network, and following the instructions. Unfortunately, it never worked for me, and I know it didn’t work for thousands of other people because I was always checking forums for an answer that wasn’t coming.

A few days ago I had the laptop open and needed a file that was on my main computer. I figured it was finally time to get this sucker fixed. So I went through the process again, only this time I saw something about setting up a homegroup. I hadn’t paid any attention to that before so I clicked on the link. There was something that said “create a homegroup”, and that sounded good, so I clicked on it and it didn’t work.

At least it didn’t create a homegroup. It gave me the option to run the troubleshooter, and even though most of the time that sucker is useless, I went ahead and gave it a shot. It came back with this message basically telling me I had to enable IPv6 to get it to work. This brought another problem because I did have it enabled. Most of the recommendations I saw online said to disable it, delete your network card from your device manager, then reboot and it would work. Actually, no it won’t, so don’t do that! I knew that wouldn’t work and it was bad advice; that happens sometimes.

I continued looking and finally found that someone had a link to the Microsoft page. I followed the link, and if you go down a little ways you’ll see something that says Fix It For Me. They offer 10 small downloads, and all you do is select the one that fits your computer and will solve the issue you’re having. My issue was “Enable IPv6″, so that’s the one I chose.

It literally took less than a minute after downloading it and it came back saying it was fixed. So I did the network thing again and it had worked; who-hoo! I could now connect to my laptop, which was a big deal. However, I still couldn’t connect to my wife’s computer, so I went to her office and ran the same exact program, and now all my computers in the house are connected; good deal!

I don’t know why all solutions aren’t in plain sight like this, as I’ve gone back and forth over the years, but at least if you read this blog now you’ll know how to get it done faster than it took me.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

Although you may not care all that much, I thought I’d talk about the new laptop I just purchased earlier today. Why? Hey, it’s a blog post, but I have some thoughts on the general process as well. That and I figure I talked about the new computer when I bought it, so I have to give equal time.

As you can see, I didn’t buy a Mac; even if I were considering it, I wasn’t starting at $1,300 for any laptop. lol I purchased a Toshiba instead, officially the Satellite P755 from Best Buy. Yeah, I know, not always my favorite store because normally their customer service stinks. But they have laptops, many of them to choose from, and let’s face it, there’s no other store in the area that has so many you can actually touch in person anymore, at least in the Syracuse area.

The general specs are 640GB hard drive, Intel® Core™ i3 Processor. 15.6″ Display and 6GB Memory. It comes with the webcam and ethernet card built in. The battery supposedly can last up to 6 hours, it has a blu-ray player, I can burn videos and CDs and it has 4 USB ports, with one of them being a USB 3.0; I hadn’t even realized those were out yet.

So, why this one and what other considerations were there? Well first, I had a budget I wanted to stay within, and almost went outside of that budget by looking at its big brother, the 17.3″ monster with the 750 GB hard drive and the i7 Pentium chip. I felt that paying $850 for that was just a bit too much in the long run, and my friend Scott had another one of those talks with me in saying that a large laptop was just a bit ridiculous since I was already used to the 15.6″ which, when I bought that particular laptop back in 2004, was actually one of the larger screens on the market.

Second, I bought Toshiba because my first laptop is a Toshiba, since I still have it. You want to know the two reasons I bought the first one? It had the large display and it was blue; yup, I bought a laptop because it was blue, as there were almost no laptops with colors in the past. The new one is black, which is a bit distressing because it looks like every other laptop out there except for the Macs (and there’s no way I’d have a white laptop; please, it’s me!). Now, I had always wanted to buy the Superman laptop some time ago when it was still Alienware, but since Dell bought them & ruined them not so much now; yeah, I said it. Anyway, you know I tend to be loyal until a brand messes with me, and the ol’ Toshiba has held up really well for me. Truthfully, if I wasn’t having some problems with the power I might not have even considered buying a new laptop.

It was time to buy a new one though. Things have changed over the years and the old laptop has problems dealing with some of the latest software. I added an extra RAM chip a few years ago to give it a boost, but it still falls short of my needs these days, especially when I’m on the road. It wouldn’t handle Office 2007 and that’s problematic when I want to give presentations and create files using that program, then have to try to remember to convert them to the old office format; messed up last year in New Jersey because I forgot to do that and almost messed up again earlier this year when I went out of town. This renders all of that worry moot.

And this sucker just went on sale, which was lucky for the store because I had stopped by last night just to take a quick look and it was $80 more than it was online; luckily the price changed overnight and the guy in the store said they’d have matched the online price since it was still their company. However, even though I went in, knew what I wanted, and paid for it in cash, a transaction that should have taken 2 minutes took about 7 because the guy needed someone to come and recount the cash I gave him. We waited 4 minutes, then he said he’d just count it again and count that as the second person as long as I watched him count, which I did. It was good to see that even employees have to wait for people to wait on them; then again, I had to wait 5 minutes before anyone noticed me standing by the laptops. Customer service is still an issue at Best Buy; oh well…

I feel like I’ve rejoined the new world again. Sure, everyone else was at the Apple store today buying the new iPhone, and even in Syracuse there was a long line of people, so I shouldn’t overly complain about my wait. At least I have something new and shiny; and some time today I’m even going to open the box to look at it.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

Lately it seems I’ve been getting more and more spam email than I have in the past. The problem is that it’s all going through my business email account, and it’s been getting on my nerves.

Mailwasher gives you the option of bouncing emails back to where they came from, and you can segregate which email account you want to use. I decided I was going to do that for a short while, and set myself up to do it. And it works very easy as well; all I have to do is click on the tab that says “bounce” and before it deletes those emails it bounces them back to wherever they came from; problem solved.

Except the problem isn’t solved. Not only is the problem not solved, but it ends up creating its own problems as well. And I knew it; I just wanted a brief period of satisfaction, kind of like how I think I’d have felt if I’d been allowed to punch the guy I talked about here in the face… at least for 5 minutes before I realized I was going to sit in a jail cell for awhile and it was going to end up costing me more than what I was suing him for.

See, the problem is that most of the email addresses are false. And those that aren’t false often belong to someone else who doesn’t know their email address is being used for that purpose. I know this because it happened to me years ago, and sometimes it was strange receiving email from myself. Then that person’s legitimate email address ends up in a spam filter for many servers and it takes awhile for it to get cleared. Since this was my business account I knew I didn’t want to deal with that.

So I turned it off a couple of days ago, but I wasn’t done. I decided to allow the host’s spam filter to start intercepting more of this spam so I don’t see it. The thing is that with Mailwasher I see it, but it’s still on the server. But since I started getting business email on my smartphone most of it is spam, and I’ve decided I don’t want to see any of that garbage on my phone. Now, I know the spam filter on the host is pretty strong, but they’ll send me a daily email of all the accounts its intercepted so if there’s something in there that’s legit, I’ll just sign in and get it.

Unfortunately, sometimes we’re stuck going the long way to resolve some of our stupid issues. But I figure if I can bring that next level of peace to my mind then all is fine. However, I have to mention something else, now that I’m on the subject. You know that post I wrote about the Gasp/Akismet experiment? Well, it seems the live spammers must have read that post also because there was suddenly a major increase in that type of spam. So I’ve turned Akismet on just to see what would happen and more of that stuff is going to my spam filter. It seems that Akismet does a better job on live spam, probably because they have a better grasp of the IP addresses that some of this stuff is coming from. At least that’s how I’m seeing it so for the moment I’m back to running both of them; gotta do what ya gotta do.

Man, the things we do when we start getting popular. lol At least you know I’m not going to do any captcha’s or change my comment system, so rest assured your good comments are safe with me.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

I finally took the plunge and upgraded to Windows 7. I kept hearing from everyone just how much better than Vista it was. And Vista being such a dog, it sure sounded like nirvana was just around the corner; nope.

Let’s start with this; Vista was one of the worst operating systems ever. Yeah, I said it. With this computer I have it would freeze up, it wouldn’t save any of my settings, it didn’t like certain programs or certain hardware I’d attach to it… just a litany of things I hated about it. So, the upgrade to Windows 7 is certainly better than what I had before in that regard.

At least partially. The first time I loaded it (yup, had to load it more than once) it took more than 4 hours, even though everyone said it should only take an hour, if that. I didn’t lose any real work time since I started loading it around 10:30 in the evening but I also couldn’t go off and do anything else, including going to bed and just ignoring it, because like all other operating systems I knew there would be questions I’d have to answer and things I had to do.

It loaded, and I tested it for about 30 minutes before shutting it down and going to bed. It looked pretty good, everything moved around okay, but I didn’t notice anything better or worse.

The next day it was time to load all the updates, and there were a lot of them. It took 2 hours to load them all, not including the service pack or the new IE 9. I was able to work while all that was going on so it didn’t impede anything I had to do. Of course when it was done it wanted me to reboot, so I did; so far no real issues.

That is, until I decided to load the service pack. That sucker took 2 hours once again, and when it was done I had to reboot. The computer never came back… that is, it rebooted, then immediately went to a black screen, and it stayed like that for 2 hours. I let it sit there, thinking it was processing something, but I figured 2 hours was long enough. So I forced it to reboot, which it did, and when it came back to the wallpaper I figured that it was all fine.

But I have Mailwasher, my email program, automatically load and open at startup, and it didn’t start. I tried opening it and got an error message. Matter of fact, every program I tried to open, except for the explorer folder, gave me an error message. And once I got the explorer folder open, it wouldn’t let me open any files, executable or not. It wouldn’t even let me get into the control panel or system restore. I eventually had to boot up in safe mode so I could remove the service pack. I tried it a second time a week later; no dice, but this time I was able to get into a repair module which removed the service pack. I’m not trying it again.

There’s also a feature in Windows 7 that allows you to select which program you’d like to use to open certain types of files. Only it doesn’t work; it opens file with whatever it’s decided it wants to use. Especially irritating is Windows Image Viewer, which comes with Win 7, but you can’t do anything except view images with it. I use a different program for images, but the settings won’t remember it and won’t use it. I’ve researched it online and found that many people have this same complaint but no one can do a thing about it. I even went into the registry to look around and I thought about removing every reference to it, but then I might have to load Windows 7a third time.

Oh yeah, why did I load it a second time? It was working better than Vista but there were still some wonky things going on. A tech friend of mine suggested loading it again, so I did. Overall resources seem to be handled pretty well but I’ve noticed that, for whatever reason, if I’m not at the computer for a few hours sometimes it freaks and decides to shut itself down, then upon my return and reboot it says it recovered from an unexpected error; aren’t all errors unexpected? I’ve also tried to research this, but to no avail.

I paid more than $100 for this? Nope, I’m not satisfied, but I’m still not going Mac so y’all that are about to tout it don’t even bother. lol Well, at least I’m not going that route yet I’ll say, because I also said I was never buying a smartphone and of course I did.

Maybe technology just hates me; sigh…
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

I have spent the better part of the last 24 hours trying to repair a friend’s computer. Actually, not quite a repair; seems he got a few viruses and malware on the computer while downloading shared music through Limewire. Suddenly he was getting all sorts of popups, then it wouldn’t let him open any programs except the one offered to fix everything; if you’re computer savvy you know where this one’s going.

by blisschan

Since it’s still on XP I went and pulled out trustly ol’ Combofix, which has never failed me in the past. And this time… it failed me! It wouldn’t load, consistently saying some file had crashed and asking if I wanted to send it to Microsoft for review. Sometimes I do that, sometimes I don’t, but this seemed somewhat suspicious. So I looked it up on my computer and found that if I’d clicked on it more malware and nasty stuff would have been allowed onto the computer; ick.

I went through a litany of things; after all, I had just cleaned and fixed this computer about 2 months ago. Nothing was working, including going through the registry trying to track down this one particular virus. There were some programs that said they’d fix it for a price, but I wasn’t having it, especially for someone else’s computer.

Finally, I decided it was time to go back to square one. Okay, maybe not quite square one, since I didn’t start with that, but it was time to go to the WABAC Machine for this particular computer; it was time for System Restore.

System Restore is a program on your computer that allows you to reset your computer to a time and place before you added something new to your computer. If you’d downloaded songs and the like it won’t touch those, but if you’d loaded any programs whatsoever it would eliminate anything you’d done that affected the registry since the last time your computer had a system restore point. There are some folks who recommend turning this off to speed up your computer performance but trust me, it’s worth a slight decrease in speed to keep this sucker open.

I opened the program and went back about 4 weeks, which I figured was a safe enough period of time where this computer was running better, and I loaded it. The sucker took almost 30 minutes, but that’s okay because I knew when it was done almost everything would be fine.

And I was right. When it had completed its task all his icons were back, his wallpaper was back, and I opened a few programs just to make sure they were back as well; they were. I could have said I was done at that point, but nope, it was time to add more stuff.

There was no antivirus on the sucker, so I downloaded and added AVG, which is not only free but looks for a few other things than just viruses. Then I added a firewall, Zone Alarm, which still works great on XP computers. I ran a full scan on his system and found some minor virus that must have been residing there some time ago, and got rid of that. Otherwise the computer was now totally clean and, after telling tons of things that he and his wife had starting up automatically and sitting in the background to beat it, loading much faster.

System Restore just might be your best friend; whew!

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

I’ve had this file for, well, 9 years now. It was a package called All Icons, and that’s just what it was. No matter what computer I had it on, if I wanted to change the icon of programs to something cool or silly, I could direct myself to that folder, go through a lot of categories, pick what I wanted and that was that. It had science fiction, cartoons, music, sports, and tons of other things; very neat indeed.

by Amanda Tetrault

Except it turned out not to be compatible with Vista, and it’s not compatible with Windows 7 either. I was holding onto the folder because there were so many things in there. I learned there was a program I could have used to convert them to something that could be used, but I’d have to do each one individually. Thousands of icon files individually; nope, wasn’t going there.

So, I finally dumped it; sent it to the recycle bin. And that got me thinking about how we all find things we like, use them a lot, then one day, not by our own hands, we learn that we can’t use those things anymore. Someone, most notably Microsoft I have to say, has taken it from us and forced us to go elsewhere for that process; weasels!

I’ve had programs that helped me fix other people’s computers, files that helped me edit images, and files that let me download other stuff suddenly go “Captain Dunsel” (in Star Trek, the term is used to describe a part serving no useful purpose) on me. Frankly, the first time it happened was back in the early 90′s when I had a program called IBM Writing Assistant that was my first writing program that suddenly didn’t work when I upgraded to Windows 3.1. That irked me because I’d also had this really cool football program that worked great with my double floppy system (man, talk about going way back) that I could no longer play either; sigh…

Right now I’m going through the sad process of thinking that the time might be nigh for Google Desktop. One of my most popular posts was telling people how to index Google Desktop with Thunderbird, Mozilla’s great mail client. However, seems that only worked on XP. It doesn’t work on Vista or Windows 7, even if one upgraded to the Desktop 64-bit version, since the old version wasn’t compatible with Vista. I’ve gone through a major series of tricks, and will probably try a couple more things, but if it doesn’t end up working to the point where I can search my email, I’ll probably uninstall it and just use Windows Search, which finds everything else on my computer just fine. And I think Google is going to end up discontinuing it anyway because the rumor is they’re no longer partnering with Mozilla

Well, I talked earlier in the year about decluttering my online life; guess it’s time to declutter my computer as well, which supposedly has more than 670,000 files on it; not by the end of the week it won’t. Obsolescence can’t rule my life anymore.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

Vista is trouble, Adobe is da bomb; let’s just get that out of the way.

Some of you may remember when I was lamenting that my Palm had gone on the fritz months earlier and how I wanted to get something that would work the same way, but not only could I not find anything else that worked like a Palm (stupid smartphones), but there was a problem with Palm the company falling apart; I think they’ve finally found a buyer, though I have no idea what that means for the company overall.

Anyway, I ended up buying a Palm, the same as I have now, on eBay, had it break 10 days later, sent it back for repairs, got it back, and I feel like my world is fairly complete once again. That “fairly” is because I still had one overriding issue that was messing me up and driving me crazy; keep my first line in your mind because we’ll be back to that.

I’ve always had Adobe Reader for Palm, which is great because I get tons of PDF files and no time to read them, and it’s great being able to put them on the Palm for those times when I have long periods away from the computer, like on an airplane. Well, for whatever reason, it wouldn’t load onto the new Palm. It was freaking me out. For almost a month I kept trying to load it here and there, and it just wasn’t having it. It wouldn’t load when I first had the Palm either, but I thought after it broke that maybe there was a problem with the software.

As I said, I kept trying to get it to load, but it wasn’t having it. I would reset the Palm; nothing. I would load and unload this program called Hotsync, which is how you sync a Palm to a computer; nothing. I would download the program time after time, even though it was the same program, and I thought that one day it would just magically work; nothing. The program was on the computer just fine, with PDFs ready to load and others already on my Palm; what the hey?

Last Thursday, it finally hit me as to what the answer could possibly be, and this is where stupid Vista comes back into play, and actually Windows 7 follows this rule, but I don’t have that so I’m not going to call it stupid; yet anyway. One thing most of us who have ended up with this operating system learned is that Vista put files in a different place than where they resided on XP. I did a quick search for the file I was trying to load onto the program, knowing the extension was “.prc”, and I found it.

What I needed to know was what folder it was in, and I found it buried deep in a User file under my name, under Documents for some reason, then under Palm and finally in a folder called Installations. I looked at the properties for the folder, and I saw that it was set to “read only”.

I clicked that off, figuring that was the entire problem, and tried again; nope. But I knew I was on to something. I went into the properties again, this time to all the “users”. Under Security, they were me, Admin, and System; go figure, but that’s what was there. There were shaded out checkmarks for each name, which meant I couldn’t do anything with them, but thought the checkmarks meant that it was already set for me to use that folder. However, it wasn’t working. So I decided to click on Edit, which opened another menu, and then clicked on Add. The name “Everyone” came up, and I selected that. I gave that name approval to do everything in the folder, saved it, and closed every menu.

I went to sync the Palm, and everything worked perfectly. I’m a happy guy once more, with my PDF files and the like on my Palm, and I’m feeling pretty smart about it all. What made me think about it? I remembered my wife’s computer, which is on Windows 7, and when I was trying to load Mailwasher onto it. For some reason, it wouldn’t let me activate it, and I tried at least once a day for a week. That is, after the two week period that it lets one run the program before it decides it’s not going to play any longer until you update. I couldn’t get it to load, so I went online to see if anyone else had the problem previously, they had, and they talked about doing what I did as a potential fix, and afterwards it worked perfectly.

See, Vista and Windows 7 have put in a lot of protections up front to keep people who don’t know what they’re doing from messing things up. That’s why most people can’t see the extension on their files, which is moronic because that makes people click on some of the stupidest stuff, not knowing it’s not a program file, and that will mess up some computers here and there as well. The area I was in is one that’s not critical to the operation of a computer, and thus it makes no sense for it to have the same kind of security as every other folder. But I guess that would have been too complicated for Microsoft to do for us; sigh.

Anyway, if you find yourself trying to install something, or get something working that doesn’t seem to have any other fault, this is something you can think of trying out.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010-2011 Mitch Mitchell

Oddly enough, I guess I owe this post to much of the spam I’ve been receiving lately. Much of it asks, stupidly of course, how they can subscribe to my RSS feed for this blog, which is pretty much all over the place, especially if you use Firefox.

However, it got me thinking about RSS feeds in general, especially as they apply to business websites. I have enough websites, I figure, but in reality I have 3 business websites. And I don’t have RSS feeds on any of them.

I’ve started wondering if I should have feeds on them. After all, I don’t do a lot of updating to those sites. One of them I have my business blog attached, and it obviously has a RSS feed, so I’ve just assumed that site didn’t need one. For my other two sites, though, I do add something here and there, and those are mainly articles, and maybe I need a RSS feed for those. After all, who doesn’t want more RSS subscribers?

The question of course is why anyone would subscribe to the RSS feed for a business site. It’s not news, and since most of us assume that most sites are fairly static, what would compel us to subscribe? Or is this a case of “if you build it they will come”?

I’m not the only one who thinks about this sort of thing. A woman named Sarah wrote an article titled Why RSS Is So Important For Your Business That You’re Probably Already Using It (whew, long title!), and she talks about the importance of having RSS feeds if you’re constantly updating your information. That’s easy to agree with, but what about if you’re not constantly updating your content?

Actually, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? As a consultant, I often advise potential clients that they need to have constantly updated content in some fashion. Of course I usually recommend blogs first, and most blogging software comes with the ability to easily add RSS feeds so you’re covered there. But what about the website itself? Other than news sources and sales pages, are there any other reasons for a business to syndicate their site?

Something more to think about, I guess. Meanwhile, the palm trees are for my friend Sue.

Propac Images 4501 18 x 18 Palm Tree I II Price – $77.22

Have you ever taken a look at the Microsoft updates that come to your computer at least once a week? I always take a quick look, although I’m not sure why since, with Vista, it came with the Genuine Advantage thing, so maybe I shouldn’t care what’s being put onto my computer.

But I do look, and most of the time I have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. For instance, last night, there were 5 updates awaiting me when I got home:

“Install this update to resolve issues caused by revised daylight saving time and time zone laws in several countries. This update enables your computer to automatically adjust the computer clock on the correct date in 2010.”

Okay, that one I easy understood, since last year they changed the dates for daylight savings time.

“Install this update to improve Internet Explorer 8′s JSON interoperability in conformance with the new ECMAScript, fifth edition standard.”

What the heck does that mean?

“Install this update to resolve issues with non-compatible applications for Windows Vista.”

I’m thinking it would have been nice if they’d told me which issues those were more specifically. Actually, to be fair, they did give a Knowledge Base article number, and if you follow that you see there’s over 200 programs it’s affecting, so maybe I should be glad they didn’t try telling me all of those.

“Both the Meiryo UI font and the Meiryo UI Bold font are included in this update. These new fonts let an application optimally display Kana characters in the Ribbon UI component and in other parts of the user interface, especially in areas where text area is limited.”

Part of me realizes I have a new font; not sure if I’m supposed to use it or not. The rest of it; no clue.

“Install this update to resolve issues caused by manifest expiration in AD RMS enabled applications. This update will fix any existing issues in addition to addressing any future application manifest expirations.”

Once again, huh? Even my spell check freaked out on that one.

Part of me gets it; these tekkie guys are trying to tell us something. They might have well written most of it in Sanskrit if you ask me. Maybe they should just say “download this update; you don’t want to know”, and being the sheep we are, we’ll just accept it and move on. It’s about as clear to us if they do that as what they’re telling us now.

I’m just feeling so stupid and inadequate now; I need cake.

Microsoft Zune 4GB MP3 Player, Red with FREE Microsoft Zune Car Pack & Microsoft Zune Premium Headphone (v2) Price – $98.99

While talking to one of my best friends Monday night, she mentioned that her computer had suddenly just crashed and wouldn’t work anymore. I had sent her a message earlier in the day through Facebook letting her know that I thought she might have a virus on her computer because I’d received two emails from her email address that had a link going back to Germany, and saying nothing else. I knew she didn’t send them, so I figured it had to be coming from her computer.

She told me that she had also been unable to get the computer to reboot, even to safe mode, and that she kept getting the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). I’m sure everyone who’s ever been on XP has had to deal with it at some point; I dealt with it often before getting this new computer. But not being able to boot into safe mode; that was something new. I told her to bring it over and that I’d see what I can do; I love challenges.

I got the computer this evening, hooked it up, and turned it on. She was correct, that bad boy just wasn’t going to boot up at all. I knew that to get into the computer I was going to have to pull out my old XP disc and boot it up with the CD. I pulled up an old bootleg CD and it booted just fine; I did have to go into the BIOS to tell it to look for the CD option first.

I decided to go into the Recovery Console option, which many folks will tell you not to do unless you know what you’re doing, and I figured I did, even though it’s been about 10 months since I’d been into a computer with XP on it. I tried to run “bootcfg” in some fashion, but nothing would work initially. I finally got it to give me a message saying I had to run “chkdsk” first, which I tried, but nothing would happen.

I decided to try it again to see if maybe it had corrected itself; nope. But I also knew that the bootleg wasn’t going to get it done. So I pulled out my genuine copy, put that CD in, and booted the computer up again. I went back into Recovery Console and tried to do chkdsk again. This time it did what it was supposed to do, finding some errors along the way and fixing them. I was going to try to run bootcfg /rebuild and create the boot.ini file again, but I decided to see if the computer would boot up since chkdsk worked.

This time it booted up perfectly, and all was right with the world; well, at least the bootup was. I hooked my cable to her computer and tried to open a browser; wasn’t happening. I knew that something was in her computer messing things up, and that I had to run some checks on it.

The first thing I did was go to my wife’s computer and download the latest version of Stinger.exe from McAfee. The new version checks for more than 1,300 viruses, as opposed to the 600 or so it used to check for. That bad boy took about 40 minutes, and when it was done it found nothing. I knew I couldn’t stop there. So I ran Combofix, which some of you might remember I had to run on a different friend’s computer’s in June. It did its thing, taking about 25 minutes again, but it found malware that it cleared out of the computer, though a couple of times some kind of thing popped up, trying to fight its way back into play. While it’s doing its thing, at some point it will reboot itself, and when the computer comes back up runs chkdsk again and does some other things before it’s finally completed its work.

Her computer is running okay once more. I say that because they’re over capacity on the hard drive, and it’s going to run slow until her husband moves over most of his music and video files to the new external hard drive he purchased. But this is a good lesson for everyone else, I figure, which is why I’m sharing it with you. I hope it doesn’t happen to you, but if it does, hopefully it’ll give you an idea of what you can try.

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