Every now and again I get a call from a friend wanting help with their PC. Usually the machine's doing something odd, not booting, or is generally 'broken' in some way. I'm no expert and would never claim to be, but I've been playing around with PCs since the late 80s and so have picked up a fair amount of useful information and am confident enough to dig around if necessary. I also keep in mind that it's pretty hard actually to break a PC. :rolleyes:<\/p>\n
Anyway, yesterday I got a call. Boot failure. The machine (running Windows ME) was cycling through boot-up until just before the desktop loads. Then…. zilch… nothing… black screen. Grabbed my toolkit (a CD with a few goodies on it) and went round to take a look. Sure enough, it wouldn't boot. And, yes, I'd like a cup of tea, "milk no sugar" (I really like that bit… gives me a few minutes to work alone). So left alone, I rebooted (successfully) in Safe Mode, did a System Restore to a couple of months back and hit restart. By the time the tea was ready, the machine was back up. I just love that moment, that feeling of success.<\/p>\n
So that's taken 10 minutes (max). The next stage took rather longer (it always does). First off I had a quick look round the system. Norton AV wildly out of date, but a decent firewall installed. (I was thankful for that, though it came back to haunt me later on). Nothing too obvious or nasty running in processes. OK, down to spring cleaning…<\/p>\n
Step 1: Copy over F-PROT for DOS<\/a> anti-virus from my toolkit. This is a great utility, as it'll run on nothing. I'd updated the definitions before I set out (download and drag the relevant files into the zip), so I was bang up to speed. Run it. It found a few things, but to be honest not too much. I've seen machines with hundreds of virii all over them. This one was pretty clean. Took about half an hour to do its stuff. :wait:<\/p>\n