Me too :D

Oh, FFFF!

 

I just sorted out my grandfather's PC and now my dad just rang to say his computer isn't letting him do anything. I've just remote desktoped into it (surprised it let me change the settings to do that) and it has Win 7 Antispyware 2012 (it's from the future) blocking most things from running and being a total nuisance.

 

This is the second time I've had to sort out this for them now. The last one was XP Antispyware 2008 which did a very similar thing and was a total nightmare to sort out.

 

Grrrrrr!

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download

(Seriously, for anyone who doesn't play games and uses their PC for web/email/office stuff, you really may as well. Firefox/Chrome, Thunderbird, Libre Office and you're away)

:D Good idea. There can't be much/anything that they do that wouldn't work with that.

^___^

(Or maybe Mint if you think a more windowsy interface would be better: http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php )

I might not do that this time but if I have to sort out anything quite as painful again I might suggest it to them. The only issue I might have with it is if things do go wrong with it because I haven't done much with linux.

 

Currently running Malwarebytes on their PC. Had to run the command prompt as administrator to stop Win7AS2012 from blocking it and could use that to run taskmanager to disable it. I seem to have removed the main issue but now when clicking on .exe files (unless they're run as admin) I get a dialog asking what program I want to use to open this file. hopefully Malwarebytes will fix that.

It wont fix that but if you google for the registry settings for exe files you should be able to download the bit of registry that's corrupted. I had that issue on a pc I was working on a few weeks ago.

I shall have a look for that then, thanks. Bloody pain in the arse some of these nasty programs.

Woohoo! One more problem fixed. Should get this done sooner than I thought. Thank goodness for Remote Desktop. Would ahve been a nightmare trying to do this over the phone. Usually I just get people to bring their PCs to me.

Yes they sure are but they pay well to fix!

Yeah remote desktop and teamviewer are life savers! Did you get that exe issue fixed?

Ha, not for me they don't. Shame I'm only doing it for family.

 

And yes, when I said one more problem I meant the .exe problem. Thanks :)

Probably not a bad thing. I usually only deal with problems and it gets old fast. Yay glad you got it!

I don't think I would mind too much sorting out problems with computers if I had them here to play with. I think phone support would drive me mad though. Luckily I don't have to do any of that fitting kitchens.

Everything was going so well then I ran combofix which sorted out the other computer. After it had finished trying to run anything brought up a message saying "illegal operation on a registry key that has been marked for deletion"

 

Oh bums! I have no restart/shutdown button and couldn't get to the cmd prompt to shutdown from there. Luckily a logoff and connecting again with RDP seems to have sorted everything out. Phew!

LOL, I know the feeling! I'm to the point where it's not cost effective to try to clean them, I just back them up and reinstall.

Plus, I dunno what your parents do online, but you can never trust that computer again to keep things private.

The (now) default unity desktop is probably just too weird for anyone who is already used to windows. I would go with the previous release with gnome 2x instead, apply all the updates and lock it down. For shit games like bejeweled, there are some plausible open sauce imitations.

I'd probably do that with my computer but easier to fix the problem than reinstall everything for them. I just won't use internet banking in their PC ;)

This Libre Office better be good. It's taking about 6 months to install :@

It's in the current iteration of Ubuntu. I preferred StarOffice in the older distros to be honest, but then again I tend to use MS Office for all that guff anyway (dual boot).

I'm sure it's lovely.