(no subject)

[cabbitzilla]

elix, I feel your pain...

So I finally rouse this morning, and stagger out to the common area of the house.... to be greeted by a frantic IM from an old friend out in Minnesota...

MinnesotaDude: Well maybe you can help me, someone has taken over my home page and i want it back, can you help me?
Me: Dunno. How badly has it been hacked, and does your password still work?
MinnesotaDude: all that is fine I just want for my home page to pop up when I log in

*blinks* oooookay. At this point I realize I've made a critical error... I had assumed that after all these years he might know his arse from a hole in the ground. Moving right along...

Me: *raises an eyebrow* When you manually enter the address in the bar... does your page come up?
MinnesotaDude: yes...its some sort of regestry thing
Me: Which browser are you using? IE, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, or some other?
MinnesotaDude: my isp is att world net and they use i e


Another layer of assumptions peeled away... I realize I'm dealing with someone who's almost utterly without a clue. This saddens me, but I really should have expected it...

Me: Yah, but is IE the browser you use for websurfing?

If so, click 'Tools', then 'Internet Options'. Under the 'General' tab, there's a box called 'Home Page'. Type the address you want it to go to as your homepage there, and then click 'Apply'
MinnesotaDude: "This operation has been cancelled due to restritions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system admin. This is what it said to do, thats why I am talking to you

I'll note that the last machine I built for this guy was almost six years ago. And a horrified thought entered my brain at that point... that machine was a Pentium 200MMX, dog slow, and installed with the much vulnerable first release of Windows 98. A couple of questions verifies that this is indeed that machine, and that nothing's been updated, upgraded, or patched since I built it for him. It took almost forty five minutes of additional questions to isolate the cause: somewhere in his web wanderings in search of free pr0n, he'd managed to pick up the CoolWeb parasite. *sigh* From there, it took another ten minutes for me to track down direct links to the cleaners and removers... because he couldn't seem to follow simple directions to the download areas.

And then he told me that he was on a 28k dialup....

It's now 4:04pm... first message came through at 12:24pm... and he's finally fixed and running again. But what really terrifies me is that he's moving back here in the next month... and I'm going to get stuck trying to 'fix' a machine that was a hunk of junk when I BUILT it.

Ah well. I'm off to see if my replacement Disk 1 works. See ya.

Comments

[elix.livejournal.com]

Ouch. You have one benefit over me. The ability to paste links. Ugh. Poor dolly.

Tell that guy to download Ad-Aware and Spybot, and then do his Windows Updates. And to not expect the ability to use his telephone line for about 24 hours while all the patches download.

[elisabeth.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, the update's going to involve shuttling the machine up here to my living room, upgrading to 98SE, and then letting it suck down the updates via my DSL. I'm not looking forward to it.

[elix.livejournal.com]

At least DSL means the updates will take about half an hour, not counting on-board installation time. Dialup = slow agonizing death from entropy.

[elix.livejournal.com]

And another thing, if you're his sysadmin, why isn't he paying you $40+/hr?

[elisabeth.livejournal.com]

*snort*

• He's an old friend... one that expects that Friend=Free
• For a Fin, he could teach us Scots years worth of lessons in being a 'cheap bastard'
• He's utterly hardware incompetent, and it's easier to do for him than to fix AFTER him
• For a relatively 'macho' dude, he whines like a pampered prima donna
• He knows where I live, and would've brought the damn thing to me anyway
• With the failure of his marriage and the resulting ostracizing(sp?) that took place, I'm about the only friend he has left

Which means I have to shut up and deal.