I Broke It so I Fixed It

The last time I was in North Alabama, James mentioned that his PC was acting peculiar and re-booting after being on for a short time.

Yup, you guessed it, I laid hands on the PC and the perfect storm of viruses, mal-ware and spy-ware that had been brewing erupted and completely hosed the PC.

I had James ship the PC to me and have been working on it, on & off,  just to get it to actually boot; where I discovered that a large number of DLL's had been corrupted and deleted, according to the system logs.

So, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I managed to get the system to boot in safe mode where I could see the details of what had been corrupted and/or deleted.

There was just too much missing for Windows to be able to recover from it so I had to do a fresh Operating System installation.

I tracked down my XP Pro CDRom and started from scratch, without deleting the full contents of the two hard drives.

I finally got the system to boot and come online, then got the system on the Net and have installed hundreds of updates and service packs so far.

I believe I was able to restore all of James' photos, MapSource Maps and even his iTunes libraries!

The D: drive was a loss and had to be wiped and formatted, after I scavenged all that was useable.

So, the system is all but a fresh slate and will require further software, apps James uses. And he'll have to re-activate his maps or un-lock them again and they should be good to go.

Now his system is setup for automated updates and scans to prevent, hopefully, a reoccurrence of these fun & games.

LATER

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