Mr Fixit (again)

I seem to be double if not triple booking myself for these last few weeks of term. I don't know whether I'm being taken advantage of for having no exams, offering out my services because I have no exams or whether I can foresee the potential boredom gap that is the summer holidays. Not that I haven;t got plenty of things be be doing during that four month period but it will be very much based around sitting in front of a computer.

For the last few days, I have hired myself out as an IT Technician to remove viruses and generally clean up a laptop and today I'm at it again but this time with a desktop. If I had a "specialist area" as it were, I think that virus removal and clean-up would have to be it. I've never failed to get rid of one before without resorting to the formatting and reinstalling Windows cheat unless it was on my own computer out of sheer laziness. I find that most of the time, dealing with viruses teaches you something new about how the operating system works. The difficult bit comes from identifying the good and bad components / processes and tracking down the location of the culprit. That is almost half the fun I think though, the challenge of getting one over on the evil person who developed the virus in the first place.

There are two main elements to virus removal as I see it. The first is experience and general computer knowledge. I've been doing this for quite a long time now and have gotten to know the 'normal' processes that run on a system and the various guises that viruses can take. For the more stubborn rootkits and unidentifiable viruses, the second element comes in very handy... Google. I'm getting pretty good at knowing where to look for sources of information and the sort of keywords you need to type in to get the right results. Some novices can do this too but then get stuck when it comes to following some of the more technical instructions that are out there.

Anyway, getting slightly sidetracked, I had fixed the laptop and was now moving onto a desktop. These are always slightly more tricky to fix because of the environment they are in. With laptops, I can take them home and use them as I wish to get the job done, looking up things on Google, clicking and trying things that might not work etc and the owner isn't there to see it if/when it goes wrong. I have had several minor catastrophes with this method - all remedied I will add - but that would have caused the owner a great deal of stress and panic had they seen the state of their machine at that point. I can also leave the scans and diagnostic tools running whilst I get on with something else whereas with a desktop, I am stuck with the owner in front of the machine whilst they run. If I leave them, I risk not seeing the results of the scan and having to trust the user to follow the remedy steps / report back to me correctly what the problem was. This almost never works as I found out today when I left the scans running before I had to leave for work. The scans found several viruses but apparently failed to clear them completely, without knowing where the viruses were found and what the virus was called means I will have to scour through the scan logs to find the answer myself when I go back to finish the job on Friday.

Working Roar this evening as general crew through up no particularly interesting failures or disasters. For the first time I did get to eat dinner properly at the food outlet rather than the usual takeaway which was nice. I almost managed this last Friday but was a bit behind having spent far to much time rigging my lights so I decided to go for the takeaway option. During the event, we rigged up the giant TV and watched National Treasure Book of Secrets from the iPlayer. Despite really not liking Nicolas Cage as an actor - and even less so now that I know he spells his name wrong - it was actually quite a good film. Watching it on a very large TV with a giant speaker probably also helped add to the atmosphere.