Drivers, XP, and Virus Fun

A community member hired me to fix their computer. It originally suffered from a virus infection, and they took it to a “technician” who proceeded to just wipe and reinstall 98. They called me after they couldn’t connect to the internet; turns out their brilliant technician forgot about the drivers. So now they have a beautiful installation of Windows 98, minus drivers for their network card, video, sound, modem, and anything else that could be vaguely useful. They have CDs for XP and 98. Of course, when I’m given the option, I install XP, and so that’s what I’m doing. On a 500 Mhz Celeron with 192 MB RAM. Because it’ll work, painfully. So I’m sitting here staring at the Windows XP installation screen, as it mocks me with the “53 minutes” left that I know will take closer to two hours.

My adventure of the week has been infecting a computer with viruses. For next week’s student worker training, I wanted to have a couple machines with malware for they to try to fix. So I spent a couple hours on the internet, pretending to be 90% of Windows users. No virus protection, no firewall, and a compulsory urge to click on every big flashing red banner that warns my computer is probably infected with spyware and I should click here to scan now. I never realized how hard it was to entirely break a computer, as I started getting so many popups and system crashes in XP that I had to boot into safe mode to keep downloading stuff. And then one of my nifty little viruses decided to break my internet connection in safe mode, so I couldn’t do anything more. At that point, I decided the computer was broken enough to serve its purpose, though it still works better than half the machines I see.