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jaalaDammit! I missed the Red Green fourteenth anniversary special on CBC![1] I also didn't get to practice today before the music building closed.[2]
This is all because I spent 6:30-10:30pm trying to fix my housemate's computer (a three-year old system running Windows 98). I started to compose the following support request message to the university IT Services but then realized the Level 1 employees would have no more idea how to solve the problem than I do:
In the end, it was decided that there was nothing for it but to back up her documents and reinstall the OS. (Actually, her brother is bringing an XP disc to see if her computer has the resources to handle an upgrade.) She doesn't hold any hard feelings--and even thanks me for educating her about spyware!--but I still feel incredibly foolish. What a miserable wannabe geek I am...
[1] Oh well. They'll probably replay it.
[2] This is definitely a bad thing because I have my Queen's Musical Theatre orchestra audition tomorrow afternoon. On the upside, I did have a flute lesson today so I'm not as rusty as I might be.
This is all because I spent 6:30-10:30pm trying to fix my housemate's computer (a three-year old system running Windows 98). I started to compose the following support request message to the university IT Services but then realized the Level 1 employees would have no more idea how to solve the problem than I do:
The computer in question is my housemate's computer. It had been operating very slowly and crashing a lot, so I installed Ad-Aware (http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/); the program found over three hundred instances of spyware on her computer. I used the program to first back up ("quarantine") and then delete a number of the items deemed to pose the highest risk to the computer.
Upon discovering that many of the "WhenU" family of spyware was connected with a program called Clock Sync, we decided to uninstall it. First, I restored (from Quarantine) all the spyware obviously connected with Clock Sync. Clock Sync's uninstaller was not listed in the Add/Remove Programs application but it was present under C:\Program Files\Clock Sync\ (called "uninstll.exe" or something like that); when this file was double-clicked, a dialogue box indicated that the program had been uninstalled.
Then we noticed that Internet Explorer would not start. So I restored each quarantined archive one at a time until all the files deleted by Ad-Aware had been restored. Then Internet Explorer would launch (i.e. the window appeared) but it triggered a C++ programming error dialogue box. Now almost every application in Windows triggers Explorer.exe, C++, or Kernel32 error messages and either freezes the operating system or forces it to shut down. [I would have inserted the exact wording of the error messages if I had completed the support request.]
What might have gone wrong:
1. The Clock Sync uninstaller may have been missing some files. Could this have caused it to mess up the system when it was run?
2. Ad-aware might have lost or corrupted some of the spyware files/entries when quarantining and deleting them.
The computer was highly unstable the first two times I quarantined and then deleted spyware items with Ad-Aware, so the application froze while the "Deleting" progress bar (indicating 100%) was still displayed on the screen. I had to force the application to shut down on these occasions. When I compared the previous scanning results with the numbers I was now getting in Ad-Aware, it appeared that the program had quarantined the files but not finished deleting them. After this point, I started deleting spyware items in much smaller groups and Ad-Aware was able to complete the task without freezing.
In the end, it was decided that there was nothing for it but to back up her documents and reinstall the OS. (Actually, her brother is bringing an XP disc to see if her computer has the resources to handle an upgrade.) She doesn't hold any hard feelings--and even thanks me for educating her about spyware!--but I still feel incredibly foolish. What a miserable wannabe geek I am...
[1] Oh well. They'll probably replay it.
[2] This is definitely a bad thing because I have my Queen's Musical Theatre orchestra audition tomorrow afternoon. On the upside, I did have a flute lesson today so I'm not as rusty as I might be.
