Wow! Sasuga has been posting like mad lately, and I’ve hardly written a thing! That being the case, I thought I’d drop a few lines about what’s been going on for the past few days.
On the day that Sasuga mentioned in his Sleepless Night post, I was busy reinstalling Windows for my brother during the day, and then working on a friend’s computer during the night. The day before, I had been trying to install jailbreak on the same brother’s iPod Touch. That day was pretty much shot because my brother had brought my niece and his girlfriend over and my grandparents showed up to top it all off. I think maybe things seem more hectic when my brother is around because of the incredible lack of patience and attention he displays. Nothing can ever go fast enough for him, and he’s always jumping around from one thing to another, and then forgetting what he was doing earlier. I wish such a personality and technology could co-exist happily together, but, sadly, they cannot (unless you're loaded and it's someone else's problem.)
Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on so many computer-related problems that I haven’t really had a chance to sit back and reflect on it all. Here are a few problems of note:
The computer that I was fixing for a friend was a laptop that was completely bugged out. Of the “ad-ware” affected computers I’ve worked on for people, I’d say this one was one of the worst. I was honestly wondering for a while if I would be able to restore it to normal operation without resorting to reinstallation. This computer had programs on it which would return when deleted. The same goes for registry entries. To make matters worse, an important asset – the Windows Task Manager – had been disabled. When the famous “three finger salute” was performed, a message would appear saying something like, “this program has been disabled by the administrator.” I was thinking, “Oh, great: my administrator is a virus.” At this point, I did a search to find out more about enabling Task Manager again, and found on Microsoft’s web site that it can be disabled by means of a system policy. The website gave the location to the value in the system registry which controls the policy. When I located the value, however, I was in for a surprise. I deleted the value only to have it return in a matter of seconds!
At that point I had a crazy idea. I readied my fingers near the ctrl, alt, and delete keys. Then, I quickly pressed the delete key to remove the value followed immediately by a quick ctrl, alt, delete, and, it worked! For the first time, I had physically done battle with a computer virus. I had opened task manager faster than the virus could place the policy value back into the system registry! Now I know how Rockman feels! I feel like an official "net battler"!
Anyway, once I had the Task Manager, the rest was history. I was able to quickly identify the offending processes, and to locate information on proper removal. It was a breakthrough. Several cleaning tools, file deletions, and software updates later, the computer was finally in a condition where it would just sit there… and do nothing! Beautiful! Free processor cycles, and no random processes running rampant in the background, contacting garbage servers somewhere.
The iPod Touch was a nice experience while it lasted. I played around for hours looking for a video encoder so my brother could convert his movie collection for viewing on the device. Then we spent a while learning our way around the apple iTunes software since we are both basically hard-core Windows users. Up to that point, I’d only used iTunes to download podcasts. My brother was pretty frustrated with it at first because it wasn’t anything like that “Zune” he had before. “That was simple,” he said. “You just do this and that.” But I assured him that with all of the people using this stuff all the time, and talking about how simple it is, it was just a matter of it being something new. Once we figured it out, operating it was a breeze.
Once I had the firmware downgraded, jailbreak was surprisingly easy to install. Apparently, it was a fairly involved process to get it working when the hack first came out; but in the time that’s passed between the first release of jailbreak and his purchase, the entire process has been reduced to a single click. Provided, of course, you have the earlier firmware installed.
Anyway it places a program on your iPod called "Installer" which allows you to run a number of interesting applications. The first program I installed for him was “Book Reader” with a King James Bible. Hopefully, he’ll read it.
Well, it’s late. I suppose that’s enough catching up for now. I’ll post more soon. This was just a rough sketch of the things I’ve been busy with lately. I still have some issues left over from those fixes that need taking care of; but when they are taken care of things should slow down a bit (yeah, right.)
Thanks for reading!
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