Cafe Latte and My Gout

   At last I was able to go and see a close relative of mine in his own newly rented apartment. He's now married with four kids of his own. It seemed not too long ago that I would then go fetch little James together with his twin brother from school and bring him back to their parent's house. On some weekends either both twins or James alone get to stay in our own house. Couldn't recall though how it was when they were in our place. But I am sure he brought a kind of renewed vigor in our family. 
    Now James very much a responsible parent himself almost always finds a way to spend time with us on important occasions- Christmas or New Year's day, Dad's and Mom's birthday, other special events. Even spent a few days at my Dad's wake who by the way he treated like his own grandfather.
    Why I visited him was also to take a look at a computer he bought a year ago. More than twice he did asked for help before that. The first time was when he noticed it started to take a rather slow time to boot up and open. This was when I passed by his work. A small but cozy fine restaurant where good food is served. Their latte I find just right too. James is a supervisor in that branch of Almon Marina as the restaurant is called. There I got to teach him what to do with his computer while having coffee. He gingerly took down notes on how to configure it  and some more tips on computer maintenance. Second  and not too long ago was when it already failed altogether.  Well it really was bound to happen sooner or later. That I was informed when he sent a text message on my cellphone one day. Called him by phone and was able to inquire what went about. Since he has was actually not that knowledgeable technically when it comes to troubleshooting and since his residence is really that far from my place, the easiest was to suggest bringing the unit back to where he bought it to have it fix. Anyway it's still was under warranty that time. He did bring the unit back to the seller. Technician reformatted it and reinstalled the system.
    It went on just fine until one day a week ago I was online.  On Facebook we chatted telling me something's gone wrong again with the pc. Almost as immediately I told him that I will be going to personally have a look see at it the following day Tuesday. Not telling him I had this gout which rendered me almost immobilzed for the whole month. That I was just starting to move around a bit out of the house just recently. Good that didn't push through. I was already about halfway on the road when he sent another text message that he's out of his house still getting a driver's licence at the transportation agency. That he would be likely to spend the whole day just for that. So we postponed it to Thursday which was two days  ago. Enough time for me to practice my still sore foot for long distance travel.
     Day came I arrived at their apartment and finally got to see what was wrong with his desktop computer. It was a mini towered  Acer computer with a partitioned  120 gigabyte hard disk, a dual core processor, a gigabyte of DDR2 memory module running Vista Home Basic (sp1). What I didn't expect was when James informed me that the unit was already smoothly the night before. He himself was surprised as the unit was unusable the whole week. Anyhow he showed me a photo capture of his computer monitor on his monitor. It was a "blue screen of death". Not certainly sure when that was exactly taken. I failed to ask actually as I sort of felt really sleepy and tired that afternoon. What we did was switch on the machine and hope everything goes on just right. It did. However I made a few changes with its present application that were running. First and foremost get rid of a fake Norton Antivirus program and downloaded a free version from Avira. Avira Antivirus was installed and updated. Ran Windows Defender which found a threat that was left by the fake program. Later configured it's start up to run only those that are necessary, deleted unwanted applications, change it for best performance rather than having Windows control it by default. As I was already in a hurry to go back home, I strongly suggested that he run a complete virus scan before doing anything else.    On the trip back, James handed me a present to take home. Two 4 piece-packs of large Hungarian sausages which he bought from a grocery store. Much better than what I asked for in return for my services- a hot cup of Almond Marina's cafe latte.  Honestly, that's because I intended to do the service free of charge when even the week before he initially asked what I would charge him.