My flatmate’s laptop has been playing up recently so I decided to finally have a look at it this weekend to fix it for him. I really wish I hadn´t! Having a quick look at it showed that it had Panda antivirus but it was a few years old and the subscription had expired, it had Ad-Aware on it but wasn’t used and SP2 had never been installed.

The home page was set to a random IP address that was no longer used, there were random popups to "search engines" plus other definate Spyware and Virus activity. After a few hours of installing Norton, updates and removing dubious programs it was looking a bit better so I went for the SP2 install. Unfortunately, after the reboot all I got was a Blue Screen of Death.

A quick Google showed that it was due to a bit of spyware causing the update to fail and that I had to remove SP2 and the spyware then try again. The best way to get rid of SP2 was through the Recovery Console so I booted into it, selected the windows installation and then asked my flatmate for the Administrator password, to which I got the response I was expecting: “er…don’t know…”.

We then spent the next hour rebooting and trying all his usual passwords plus anything that I could think of that he might of used. Just as we were about to give up I came across a boot-cd on t´interweb that boots a Linux distro and reads the registry to find the password for any user account. We booted off the CD and hey presto! The password for the Admin account is… BLANK PASSWORD!!! I nearly screamed….

After removing SP2 the next problem was that NAV wouldn´t run now, just kept asking for a reboot which didn´t work. I found a tool on the Symantec site to remove all registry entries to the program and then let you manually delete the program folders. I then spent the next eight hours running various online virus scans, installing and running the latest NAV then MS Defender, Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D until it only came up with clean scans from everything! Woo hoo!

And the moral of the story is… go for a clean install every time… it’s quicker!

I´ve gone and blatantely copied Ed  and downloaded the beta of IE7 to have a look at how the next version was progressing and whats been put in it so far. Seems pretty good so far but I´ve only had a look at a few sites. As with Ed, here´s a screenshot

 
Also since I´m a cynical bastard and love being right I´m glad I was only using it for one and a half minutes before I made it crash. And all I did was shove it on full screen and back while loading a Google search for one of sites! Ah well, they´ll get it sorted out by the time it comes out of beta. No wait, by service pack 1. Maybe service pack 2…
 
On the plus side all of our sites that I checked render the way I wanted so I´m happy. I´ll eventually get around to testing all the bits that use Javascript or other client side oddities but for the time being any early adopters will have to put up with errors until I get given a testing team.
 
Oh well, one distraction out of the way… Back to it!

The new iMac is one of the ones based around Intel processors as opposed to the previous PowerPC chips from IBM. The good thing about them is that they´re using the new Core Duo chips, the new dual core (as the name suggests) so they should be pretty sweet machines.

The bad thing about them is that they come with the usual Apple price tag and cost a pretty penny. As soon as I´ve got some disposable cash in my budget then I might get one for website testing purposes and graphics and media work. Until them I think I´ll upgrade my majorly outdated main desktop to a dual core processor.

The only question is to go with AMD or Intel…. I think I´ll go with one of the AMD Athlon 64 X2s. Time to go shopping!