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.

Ack, I had to help my Dad remove one of those fake antivirus/antispyware programs a few months back from his office PC (he's a one man business renting a single office room). It was a feckin' nightmare. He's still running XP which is fine and dandy as he's got some ancient software that he doesn't want to risk on a newer operating system. In the end I used something called BartPE to kill it off. I used this a lot when I was doing my own "business" a few years back supporting comuters and networks in the local area and it's a life saver. Bit fiddly to get a good copy working but bloody handy too.

Not sure whether there's a version that'll work for Windows Vista/7 so it might be in the obolete bin a little bit these days, but perfect for the XP machines still hanging around.

Next time he kills his PC though, I'm going to tell him it's broken and he needs a new one. He's been saying he'll get a new PC for two years. Just worried about the funny little tools he uses...

This sounds like me and my father in law.

 

He fills his PC up with shit over the space of a year or 2 then I fix it. He's had variants of the XP Antispyware 2008 twice now. I've set Malwarebytes to run at startup but he still manages to get it.

 

Last time getting rid of of XP Antispyware 2008 did so much damage I ended up flattening the system and re-installing it.

 

I hate being family tech support :(

Sometimes the only thing you can do is wipe it and start fresh. The nasties are getting nastier!

The family or the PC?

I refuse to answer that!

This had never occured to me..

 

why not?

You could just generally broadcast to the family, apropos nothing, that certain malware is associated with searching for pr0n. He might stop then.

Or get him onto Linux.