Tech Oddity

Some quick updates:

• I finished the computer work I listed in the last post.
• I took a trip to see relatives between the 19th and 27th so I didn’t have time to post much on the forums or work on my web site.
• I have updated the web site to use WordPress 2.7
• I added a notice to the forums that states as of 2009, general support questions should be posted to the HowTo Geek forums not my forum. This is due to 1. The HowToGeek forum has more users and resources to handle support questions, 2. I don’t want to deal with general support questions on two forums.

Some people may have noticed I haven’t been as active responding to posts on the HTG forum in the last couple weeks.
This is because I’ve been busy fixing computers around town.
For anyone interested, here is what has happened:
December 2st – I went to fix someones (Person A) computer, lets call it Computer A. It had a bunch of Adware/Spyware/Rootkits on it that I couldn’t remove in one night so I decided to come the next available night.
December 3rd – Anther person’s (Person B) computer (Call it Computer B) had some corrupted system files and needed Windows to be reinstalled. I took the computer home as it could take a while to reinstall the OS and the programs. I looked and could not find a Windows XP Home OEM disc. The person didn’t have one and I only had a Windows XP Home Retail disc so the existing product key wouldn’t work with it. I was stuck.
December 4th – Went to fix Computer A again and still couldn’t remove the malware so I took the computer home to work on it.

December 5th -
1) I burned an Ultimate Boot CD to scan for malware on Computer A as normal mode barely worked and I couldn’t install things like SuperAntiSpyware in Safe Mode. The tools found about 24 peaces of malware. Now normal mode worked and I needed to fix Norton AntiVirus as it had been corrupted.
2) Attempted to install Windows XP on Computer B using RIS (Remote Installation Services) and couldn’t get it to work because of a lack of a network driver. This was before I found out I had the wrong disc type and product key wouldn’t work with it.
3) I got another computer (Call it Computer C) from someone else (Person C) with performance problems.

December 6th -
1) Got RIS to work on Computer B after finding the correct network drivers but due to a non-working product key I couldn’t install Windows.
2) Scanned computer C and didn’t find any malware. I was puzzled as to why the Windows XP loading screen was slow. I had heard a click before and thought it might be hard drive failure so I ran some scans to see if that was the case and they all said the drive was fine.

December 7th – December 14th – I don’t have time now to finish this story. I can just say for now that it involves Computer D (City), Computer E (Curch), Computer F (Person D Laptop 1), Computer G (Person E Laptop), Computer H (Person D Laptop 2) and my desktop computer having problems.
Computer A & B are done and ready to go back to the person’s home. I can see now that there are some things I could have done differently so they would have been done sooner but hindsight is 20/20.
Computer C was done and went to it’s owner on December 8th.
Computer D, Computer E, Computer G were quicker things and are done.
Computer F had a Hard Drive Failure (2 Bad Clusters) and I will replace it soon when it’s replacement gets here.
Computer H is now done. It had a broken laptop keyboard and some performance issues. The keyboard is now fixed but I’m not sure about the performance issues. I’m not sure if HP made a bad design choice, the hardware doesn’t agree with Windows Vista or what. I did install Service Pack 1 but it didn’t really change much.
I spent most of today on it messing with Norton AntiVirus to see if it was the problem. So far it seems that wasn’t the case. It was the Wacom Tablet drivers that were causing issues.
My computer just had one bad sector on the hard drive so I’m just going to keep using it, until it totally fails and then I will restore my image backup of the hard drive on a new drive.
Now it’s post 1AM here and I need to go to bed soon thus why the last week isn’t compleatly done above.

The forum now uses the site theme so the forum not only has the same look as the rest of the site, you can actully return to the home page or switch to another page now.
I could not run WordPress from bbPress to share a common theme.
Instead I had to use symlinks and if statements to get them to share a common header and footer.
Also because the sidebar is powered by WordPress, I had to use an iframe to get it on the forum.
There are a few issues with the iframe, one being the login function doesn’t work.
I will try to fix the login issue but in the mean time you will need to login from a non-forum page like the home page and login before going to the forum.