Troubleshooting

Another computer fixed. This one I've turned down before. It was a used unit that came from an internet shop. And that meant it had millions of miles already up its odometer if ever it had one. More war-torn than a marine that fought in Vietnam. A few of its motherboard capacitors bulging a bit and so prophesied it would soon be heading to the junkyard. But it seem the old machine just wouldn't give up that easily. Not until its owner approached me and told me it got infected by some virus.  More out of curiosity than anything else that I readily went to have a look at the "patient". It was indeed a Trojan. First time I've seen one like it. It boots up fine until the operating system opens up. Then a window opens up where it says "It's my birthday today. Please don't kill me......". Clicking okay, a screen-sized wall paper of anime characters appears and that's it. Nothing comes after. Going into safe mode is just as impossible. The culprit was one small gadget that is mostly used nowadays- USB flash disk. Not only did it infect this one particular veteran, it was also used on her neighbor's computer. I could just imagine how mad she might have been at her.

At the end, I had to reformat the whole thing, reinstall its OS, installed a free updated version of AVG(which it did not have before!), etc. Got hold of the flash disk and scanned it in my own computer. Lo and behold, it had 37 different viruses. Well, them viruses won't be doing anymore harm. To make sure, I formatted that disk back to its health again.