Along with the Christmas tree and the presents and the huge meals, there's a new holiday tradition to look forward to: fixing Mom's PC!
Back at the old house, your old bedroom has been converted into a study or a craft room, and sitting there is the PC that your folks bought years ago.
"Can you take a look at it? It's been acting kind of funny."
Uh oh.
What's in your toolkit for fixing Mom's PC, and how do you use it?
I usually carry a USB flash drive with downloads of my favorite freeware apps on it, including AVG for anti-virus and anti-spyware. (Also, productivity and entertainment apps, too -- OpenOffice, Firefox, iTunes, VLC, Google Earth, GIMP, Winamp, miscellaneous video codecs, etc.) I haven't yet set up a bootable USB flash drive -- not sure if it's worth the effort for this purpose.
But if Mom's PC is already messed up, then it may not be possible to install anything on it until it's been cleaned. Some viruses actually block attempts to install anti-virus software... so it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. You can't install the software till it's clean, but you can't clean it till you install the software.
This is something I have wondered about -- how do you clean a PC that's so badly infested that it won't boot properly? Sure, you could boot the PC with a Linux boot disk -- but is it possible to clean out Windows malware from a PC when it's running Linux?
Back at the old house, your old bedroom has been converted into a study or a craft room, and sitting there is the PC that your folks bought years ago.
"Can you take a look at it? It's been acting kind of funny."
Uh oh.
What's in your toolkit for fixing Mom's PC, and how do you use it?
I usually carry a USB flash drive with downloads of my favorite freeware apps on it, including AVG for anti-virus and anti-spyware. (Also, productivity and entertainment apps, too -- OpenOffice, Firefox, iTunes, VLC, Google Earth, GIMP, Winamp, miscellaneous video codecs, etc.) I haven't yet set up a bootable USB flash drive -- not sure if it's worth the effort for this purpose.
But if Mom's PC is already messed up, then it may not be possible to install anything on it until it's been cleaned. Some viruses actually block attempts to install anti-virus software... so it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. You can't install the software till it's clean, but you can't clean it till you install the software.
This is something I have wondered about -- how do you clean a PC that's so badly infested that it won't boot properly? Sure, you could boot the PC with a Linux boot disk -- but is it possible to clean out Windows malware from a PC when it's running Linux?
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