A call for help!

[Andrew Moxom]

Don't most Windows systems allow you to go back to a time when the system was last working well? I know mine did when I had problems? I had a similar issue when some internet company hacked into my computer as the ISP I was using had (comcast) got rid of their McAfee free installs and went to Norton instead. Needless to say, my PC was held ransom by some POS internet company saying I must hand over my credit card info to buy new virus software.... I went back a week prior to this happening and booted my PC from there. After upgrading to the new ISP Norton service, that problem went away. I suggest you look into doing similar for your PC.

 

[lxdude]

How efficiantly do they process film?

 

[Photo Engineer]

P.E.-

GET YOURSELF A MAC!!!

I had as many problems with a MAC as I had with a PC. In fact, the first viruses were for the Macintosh computer. Also I had problems with very buggy software. The LISA was worse.

PE

 

[Photo Engineer]

Don't most Windows systems allow you to go back to a time when the system was last working well? I know mine did when I had problems? I had a similar issue when some internet company hacked into my computer as the ISP I was using had (comcast) got rid of their McAfee free installs and went to Norton instead. Needless to say, my PC was held ransom by some POS internet company saying I must hand over my credit card info to buy new virus software.... I went back a week prior to this happening and booted my PC from there. After upgrading to the new ISP Norton service, that problem went away. I suggest you look into doing similar for your PC.

I guess I didn't make it clear, but with the services disabled, you cannot step backwards. You needed a download of the new services file and dat file from Microsoft and McAfee to renable the backup. However, by that time, the lack of services had corrupted even that backup.

Everything appears to be about 99% back to normal now.

PE

 

[argentic]

Install Linux on your PC, and you'll never need McAfee again.

 

[Photo Engineer]

Install Linux on your PC, and you'll never need McAfee again.

I did have SuSe Linux on my computer for years with great success. I had a minor hardware glitch and the local companies refused to do any work on non-Windows software machines. They could not run the diagnostics in Linux.

In the end, since I had a huge hard drive, with dual boot, I let them go ahead but told them not to touch the Linux partition. In spite of all of that, they somehow trashed the untouched Linux partition and data, and the dual boot would attempt to start Linux and then say that the boot record could not be found. I was never able to repair it nor was a Linux expert friend.

Surprisingly, OS/2 was the only system for which I never needed help, nor a virus checker. It crashed sometimes, but always recovered somehow and no one wrote viruses for it. Of course it was never a big favorite and so it missed all of the hackers.

Anyway. Yeah, I got into computers in the very early days at EK and personally with the Apple ][, then the Apple ///, the Lisa and the Mac. I've used just about all possible OSs, and then into the PC and several OSs there as well. I've used the Heath OS, Radio Shack OS, and a lot more including QNX and the Motorola OS. None is perfect. Kodak even built its own computer called the LLM (Lousy Little Machine ) which we used for process control. It used a 6809 OS.

Oh, I've also worked with the Taylor, the Westinghouse and the Siemens computers as well. I've grown out of that all and no longer have tools, but I can diagnose what an internal PC problem is most of the time even if I cannot solve it with resources at hand. In this case, you needed some specialized HW and SW tools.

Thanks again everyone.

PE

 

[Tim Gray]

This might be of interest to you.

mcafee to pay for repairs

 

[Photo Engineer]

Thanks. That is very very useful Tim.

PE

 

[pentaxuser]

This might be of interest to you.

mcafee to pay for repairs

Sounds like the "too little, too late" and "we'll still argue" philosophy that large companies seem to follow despite there being plenty of evidence from other companies' experience that this is a recipe for disaster with consumers from which some companies never recover or if they do then the eventual recovery is slower and the cost is higher than the more customer friendly approach would have been.

The corporate brain has poor learning skills in the area of customer relations

pentaxuser

 

[jeffreyg]

Follow those who said to backup your entire computer on a bootable external hard drive. If a disaster occurs you can erase and reinstall from the backup or at about that time you probably want a larger hard drive anyway so you can replace the old one copy back on to it and then erase the old one and use it for backup or trash it.