I went to install some applications on a computer. After installing Norton SystemWorks 2006, the computer crashed. I saw the Blue Screen of Death and had to get the computer working. I'm not sure of the cause of this BSoD, but it was fixed. I installed a new hard drive with Windows XP preloaded and made the other hard drive shared. I had to go into the Dell BIOS (it was a Dimension 9100) and change the RAID settings for the hard drives to work. The whole process took a week or two to complete, but the end result was good.

A customer had an old Compaq Presario that was not working very well. It would take a long time to load Windows 98, and could not use the dialup Internet connection very well. The hardware was so old and outdated, that she decided to purchase a new system from me. I put it all together and sold it to her for a very reasonable price. This system could have sold in a store for nearly $900, but I sold it for under $600.

A customer's computer stopped connecting to the Internet sometimes shortly after I cleaned it. I reset the modem and it worked fine. It appears as though the modem is not working as well as it can, but it still works.

A lady had her husband call me to clean his computer. It had a virus and some pop-ups. He wanted to learn how to clean it himself after another technician told him that he couldn't learn. I showed him what I did and gave him details about it. His computer ended up clean after a little while and now works very well.

A customer had me look at another one of his computers that was operating slowly. This computer had AOL 9.0, Notron Internet Security 2004, and McAfee Virus Scan installed and running on startup. This computer is very slow. My job was to make it faster. I removed some spyware I found with Spybot Search and Destroy. I removed temporary files and history. Doing all of this made it operate faster, but it still wasn't as good as possible.

Another recurring customer gave me his computer to fix. He tried to connect to his DSL modem to use his SBC service, but it would not connect. I tried connecting with my laptop and it worked just fine. That would tell me there is something wrong with his settings. After doing much research, I still couldn't seem to find the problem, but I figured it was a registry setting or other Windows(R) setting. I told him of the problems I was having fining and fixing his problems and we decided to format the hard drive and reinstall Windows(R) XP Professional SP2. I also backed up his data onto a DVD before the new installation.

A recurring customer contacted me and told me of his computer being infected with trojans and the like. I ran Spybot Search and Destroy, AdAware, Symantec Security Check, Trend Micro House Call, and McAfee Virus Scan. There was much spyware and trojans. It took a few hours to remove everything. After all this was gone, he had me reset his wireless network and get other computers associated to his WEP protected wireless network. He is using a Linksys WRT54g with his Earthlink DSL service.

I got a call from a man about his computer operating slowly. I removed some viruses and spyware using Norton Antivirus and Spybot Search and Destroy. Also, his Internet connection through SBC DSL was down. I tried to hook up my laptop to him modem and use his or my account and it wouldn't work. I had him call SBC and they sent out a technician within a day. It turns out there was some problem on their end in his area.

I received a call from a friend about his father's computer. He purchased a computer a month ago, but it stopped connecting to the Internet just a few days ago. He has a dial-up connection with Earthlink. The connection seemed to be live, but no pages were displayed. I checked the status of the Norton Personal Firewall preinstalled with Norton Internet Security 2005 and found it to be running. I turned it off and then was able to connect to the Internet. After talking to Symantec over the phone, the permissions in the firewall configuration that were set to block were reset to permit. With these changes, theh Internet was available again.

A customer referred me to one of his customers who had virus and adware problems. Her computer would bring up pop-ups with every new web page. This seems to have been due to the infection of the QoolAid virus. There were some trojan horses, spyware, and adware all on her machine. I ran HijackThis! and Spybot Search & Destroy 1.4 and was able to reset Internet settings, remove malware, and get the computer to operate at a faster speed. I was not able to completely remove the QoolAid virus.

A customer purchased a new computer from Dell. He asked me to go set it up for him. I put it in its place, plugged-in the peripherals, and installed software. I also transferred files from his old Dell computer to the new one. I set up his printer and wireless router. All this was routine work and completed in a few hours.

A customer had a Dell laptop that was operating slowly. I found that he was using most of his RAM on startup. He had only 128MB and I upgraded his laptop to 1024MB (1GB) of RAM.

I went to a customer's house after receiving a call about a notebook not working anymore. When I went, it said ntfs.sys was corrupted. I tried to copy it from the Windows XP Home Edition CD-ROM, but it would not copy. This will be resolved on May 10. Another computer there, a Dell Dimension PC running Windows ME, would operate slowly and then restart. It was infected with spyware such as Wintools, CoolWWWSearch, Gator, and more. I installed HijackThis! and Spybot Search & Destroy 1.3 and was able to cleanse most of the computer. I also deleted registry entries, files, and folders. It still has traces of CoolWWWSearch, but the computer is very much usuable now, compared to its inoperable state previously.

A customer referred one of his customers to me who has a Compaq Presairo 7500 series desktop PC that froze. I scanned her computer for viruses and found none, but I did find some spyware when I used Spybot Search and Destroy. I removed entries from the registry so they would not startup with Windows 98 automatically and got her Internet connection switched from using SBC Yahoo! Dial to Internet Explorer. Her computer is using less memory on startup and runs faster than before.

I met a lady in Circuit City the night before who asked me to go to her house. I went to get one of her laptops connected to the Internet through one of her routers and found that all it took was a network cable and a few minutes. I plugged-in the cable to the computer and router and ran the Netgear router setup process and it was done.

I had a computer to fix that started Windows XP with 54 running processes and used up 420MB of the 512MB of RAM. The main problem was the collection of programs that started with Windows, AOL software being the main one. AOL's speed increasor took up half of the processor and anywhere from 20MB to 150MB of RAM at any given time. It now starts with less processes and runs much faster than it did originally.

I installed a router (Linksys BEFSR41) at a customer's house to help assist with the blocking of spyware. AT&T Worldnet did not give the user name and password to the user, so it took about 15 minutes of waiting on hold to acquire the information.

This assignment was to fix a computer that would not allow access to the registry editor or task manager. It was not able to connect to the Internet and ran slower than usual. The Internet service was Earthlink DSL. The problem was a virus in the \%system root%\system32 folder and did not allow for certain programs to execute properly. I ran online virus scans and used spyware checking programs to find the problems. It took about two hours to fix.

This assignment was a bit out of the ordinary. The user was not able to log-in to Hotmail using Internet Explorer. She could not log-in to her AT&T webmail, either. It took some time searching her computer for spyware, finding Ezula and many more threats. This was fixed in about two hours.

I was to install a 5.25" floppy disk drive on a new computer that I assembled about 6 months ago. The computer had Windows XP Professional installed on it, and would not boot when I first plugged in the drive. I had to reformat the hard drive, install Windows 2000 on a partition, install Windows XP Professional on the other, and install the drivers for the motherboard and other hardware on the operating systems. After installing Windows again, the floppy drive worked. It did, though, need a new cable, rather than the old one it used to use in a different computer.