The worst computer I have ever worked on
I worked at a computer repair store for a year, and then did computer troubleshooting for people part-time for many years, usually visiting their homes to do work. These were all pretty old people who knew shit about computers, or people with teenage sons, so it was always a disaster. However it was relatively easy work – clean the fuck out of it with spybot & adaware, get rid of Norton/McAfee(which had expired subs anyway), throw on AVG and I was good to go.
I stopped doing that years ago, but I’m still the go to guy for my family and extended family. They have a computer problem? I’m the guy that fixes it. I don’t particularly enjoy it, but meh, I know that most people know shit about computers, and they’d get raped if they went to the Geek Squad or whatever, so I’ll clean it up happily while watching some DVDs or whatever, and not bother charging them. Good karma, innit?
But yeah – I’ve seen a lot of bad computers. The worst was my sister in laws that I had to work on back in January. I had to back everything up before reformatting – but it wouldn’t even copy/paste. I had to boot into MS-DOS and do it manually, and it wouldn’t recognize my USB drive or key, so I had to install a fucking hard drive on there, and then copy everything to it. To make matters worse, the hard drive was only 2 gigs(a real old one) and they had about 20 gigs of stuff, so yeah – I had to take it out, install it in another computer, move everything over etc – about 10 fucking times.
Brutal. And easily the worst computer I have worked on.
Until tonight.
I have my brother in laws computer here to fix. It’s been here for about a week, but I didn’t have time to do anything with it. Finally I had a spare hour, and figured I’d clean up any spyware(I was told it was “slow”), back everything up, and reformat. Nice and easy.
Ummmmm…..no.
How can I best explain how bad this computer is fucked up. Let’s see…
Have you ever ran Hijackthis before? If you don’t know what it is – it basically lists all the processes running on your computer on startup etc. The average user might have 20-30 entries running. I’ve seen 40-50 for fucked up cases, and I think the highest I ever saw was about 70 or 80, and most of that was just Logitech shit.
So yeah. 20-30 average, 40-50 if a bit fucked up, 70-80 in extreme cases.
This Hijackthis log? I think it warrants the return of a Scotsman trademark:
Over 8000.
Over 8000.
Over 8000.
I wish I was joking. I really do. But I am not. I am not even close to joking. This has over 8000 fucking entries in the hijackthis log.
Seriously. If you gave me a computer and told me to fuck it up – I couldn’t even BEGIN to get over 8000 entries in the hijackthis log. I am pretty sure if you went to Limewire, typed in “sex” and then downloaded any file that ended in .bat or .exe, you wouldn’t get even close to 8,000.
Just unbelievable.
Here’s the log for anyone curious. I’m off to kill myself just now.