Dad to the Rescue

"Dad! DAD! Come quick!"

These are certainly words that no father ever wants to hear. I dropped what I was doing and lumbered with a sense of urgency up the stairs. I sensed by the tone of his voice that there was no blood spilled, no bones broken and no lives threatened, but nevertheless there was panic in the poor boy's voice.

The emergency was no emergency, it was a problem with his computer. Son number one has little time or interest in machines that don't behave. He has little time, lots of work and he was demanding priority, in home, after hours, technical support from me. Kevin complained of "no audio." In fact there was audio in other applications but not in his web browser. We rebooted, but the problem persisted. I roll up my proverbial sleeves (because I was wearing a t-shirt and even when I wear long-sleeved shirts they never get in the way).

I started by rolling back the system using a restore point from the previous day. I love the idea of rolling back in time with a computer. How many weekends might I have rolled back if we had a simlar option in life.

That seemed to fix the audio problem and I thought my work was done. But then I noticed that his virus protection software was no longer running which was curious because I had just re-installed it the weekend before. When I clicked on the google link for the virus software, instead of linking me to Microsoft's website I was taken to some shopping page. This was bad.

As an unpaid and unprofessional technical support guru, I like to begin all such major repairs by shouting at the offender. "What the hell did you click on?" "What the hell did you download?" He insisted that all of his computing was clean but I was satisfied by the look of fear in his eyes so I moved on to trying to fix the problem.

I did a bit of research found a free Malware removal tool. Well it was called a "removal tool" but in the end all it was good for was reporting that he was infected 15 different ways.

With no bedside manner, I declared, "holy crap" as I stared at the results screen. That got the rest of the family to crowd around the screen displaying the results. It told us among other things that he was infected by 5 different Trojans. "Maybe I got that from visiting USC's website?" observed the optimistic offender. Ahh, amateurs.

The diagnosis was clear…the machine was AFU. It was also clear that we needed to put the computer into the Wayback Machine. Now we weren't just going back a day, but going back to the very beginning. But that requires the original system disks. And that requires a level of overall organization in one's life.

Where were the disks? I was quickly able to locate the disks for three computers, but not the computer in question. If I couldn't find the disks that meant I would have to buy a new one and given his sense of urgency that might mean I would have to pay full retail!  Now that's what I call motivation to find the disks!

I decided to sleep on the problem. The answer did not come to me in a dream, but I tackled my organizational issues with a new gusto the following evening. I created three locations and prioritized each of the locations. I systematically looked at cleaned out and cleaned up two shelves and one drawer. No disks but lots of good cleaning. It had been decades in some cases. I found an old Zip Disk and an original Palm Pilot (no longer working) mixed in with my extensive piles.

The room is little more than 14' x 12' and I was confident it was somewhere but I couldn't quite figure out where. Then it dawned on me. There was a grey metal thing that has stuff in it that requires savings.  We call it a filing cabinet. Of course it was the last place I would ever think to look because I have a fear of filing cabinets. Things go in and never seem to come back out. I've successfully avoided filing for 30 years and I didn't see how they could be in the filing cabinet. They were in the filing cabinet.

The restoration process began on Friday night about 9:00 pm. We pulled off all of his data, changed the boot order, installed the operating disk and deleted his main partition. There was no turning back now.

By 11:30PM I had a basic working computer again with that circa 2001 Windows XP look and feel. But with a notebook computer, installing the operating system is the easy part. Getting everything to actually work, is the hard part. This challenge I saved for Saturday: Day 3.

The computer was pretty much useless because the Internet connection didn't work. I went to install the factory provided "driver" disk but it required installing each and every driver by hand, many of which were designed for different models and gave me errors. Wonderful, somehow I had the wrong drivers.

I ultimately decrypted Dell-speak and discovered that the 10/100 driver was the network card's driver and ultimately that paved the way to an internet connection. Then I could get onto Dell's site where the right drivers were stored. Silly me to think that you could just insert a disk and install everything with one command.

After two hours of trying to save the machine, two and a half hours of installing the operating system and three hours dealing with drivers and installing programs, I declared the patient well again.

This was the point where I would be showered with praise and affection and told, "Dad, you are the greatest." At least that's how it would work in my dreams. Instead, I got, "Dad, what's wrong with the screen."  I told him I didn't know and asked are the fonts too big or too small? "Neither, they are just wrong!" It took me a couple of beats to realize that I failed to install the graphics card driver. That was quickly resolved and I thought I was done, but no praise would follow.

It wasn't over by a long shot. There was more help required, more demands, more complaints. Mostly I figure he was just bummed that he wasn't able to get a new computer out of the whole deal. I suspect that right now he is visiting malicious websites trying to push his old machine over the edge in hopes that the second time around I'll cave to pressure of buying him a new one.

December 13, 2010

© Greg Harris, 2010

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