OK, I'm writing a story in which an IT troubleshooter needs to locate an unknown virus and irradicate it without destroying the data.
The fictional device has a 1 gig solid state C drive and a Terabyte drive D. I'm presuming that the virus would have compromised something on the boot drive.
C drive is using 79.6 of 97.8 available
D drive is only using 4.75 of 931 available.
Specs on the machine:
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz 2.60 GHz
Installed RAM 8.00 GB (7.86 GB usable)
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
The symptom is the computer is running terminally slow. Taking for ever to boot and worse at loading pages on the internet.
I'd like it to sound like he knew what he was doing. What I need is a thumbnail sketch of the process. Is it possible to tether it to another computer and scan the drive with some high powered tool, find the virus and repair the damage? If you could toss in the name of a virus that might cause something like the symptom above.
I'll be glad to list you as technical advisor if you'd like.
Comments
SSD issue
1GB SSD wouldn't have much fitting on it. A lot of machines came with 64 or 128GB SSD around the time of that processor.
Solid state drive size
OK. For all of you who are concerned about the size of the solid state drive. I miss read the information. It’s a Samsung MZNLN128HCGR-000L2 -- 120 gig using 102.32 of 119.24 available.
I based my fictional system on my own laptop and when I called up the drive size in settings, they listed the size in poor contrast small font.
For the story, the actual specs of the machine is irrelevant. It will never be mentioned. I supplied the info about the machine to give you some real world basis for the advise you were giving.
Thanks everyone for responding.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
tests that can be done
First thing with those symptoms (on windows 10) is to reinstall drivers with the ones correct for the specific version of windows 10 you have. (1703, 1809, 20h2, etc.) As a drivers made to run on Win 10 ver 1902 can cause a memory leak on a earlier or later version of windows 10.
As for booting and scanning from another device. I have a bootable thumb drive with a ton of tools on it that I can boot the PC to and run those tools, virus checking, hardware testing etc. two of the most reliable tools to do this techs have used over the years is called Ultimate boot disc and Hiren's boot CD, both can be installed on a thumb drive and Boot the PC.
We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
As already said, there wouldn
As already said, there wouldn't be a 1 GB SSD. That was outdated years ago, even for SD cards for cameras and phones. The smallest I've seen in the last 10 years is 16GB, and that was from an early chromebook. Windows 10 requires at least 24 GB in footprint for just the OS, with nothing left over.
When I'm hunting viruses and malware like that, I boot off of a separate bootable flash drive, running one of a variety of linux distributions. If the drive is encrypted, you'd need to know the encryption type, and the key, in order to mount the drive(s). I usually end up doing manual scans for files created during a certain time period - modification dates are too easy to fudge, but the creation date is harder to do so. Then I look for files accessed recently, and so forth. I generally move them to a separate folder, in case I make a mistake and move a required file. (This happened with Intuit, when they were in their "Boot sector viruses are perfectly reasonable ways for us to enforce installation limits." stage)
Keep in mind, there have been no real viruses for years. Almost all malware is made up of droppers and trojans - they aren't classic viruses, which replicate by infecting bootable media. I suggest spending some time on the bleepingcomputer site, reading up on the (often poorly written) symptoms and fixes.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Not quite true
Even the newer malware will go for persistence (survive reboots etc.) There are even versions which will hide so deep inside your computer that they even survive a regular fresh install of the operating system.
Otherwise I have nothing new to add, because I would just exorcise a system with these symptoms. Preferably going for new hardware, the i7-6700 is at least 5 generations behind and 8 GB’s of RAM is fast becoming too little. If not new hardware, at least use a Linux distribution (or hardware vendor tooling) to completely overwrite the SSD and start afresh. (Whaddaya mean you have no backups?)
Oh, and if the PC is this badly infected the user will need to be re-educated as well, because that is absolutely not necessary. I know because I used to set-up and maintain a windows system for my ex-father in law and he never had any issues like this.
Anne Margarete
Persistence
In addition to all of you've mentioned there are now APTs that now persist in the unused memory sections of your SSD and even UEFI (BIOS) if one were to be really stupid about running certain things.
A total wipe of the SSD over ALL of the memory cells (not good for write life on it) for the former and a reinstall of the BIOS too for the latter.
Few home users ever have to deal with either issue.
With modern hacking it can be summarized that wherever there is a part of your computer with any possibility of persistence, there will be state actors or malware companies (e.g. NSO group) who will exploit that persistence somehow.
The old days of using PROMs instead of EEPROMs would prevent such a thing (other than through supply chain poisoning, which is a thing.)
Open source software for Linux type stuff is no guarantee of safety either these days as there have been instances of deliberate repo poisonings even by maintainers who go rogue or malware being slipped in and not detected.
The most terrible virus
The most terrible virus is located beween keyboard and chair.
Modern viruses usually don't slow machine, they tend to remain invisible. What could really slow machine down is hourly anti-virus scan with archive unpack. Once set up, it is hard to detect. It requires the troubleshooter's out of the box thinking to find and neutralize the problem.
2nd this
As a former IT professional, (among other careers I had before trading them in for the title of Mom) most system slowdowns aren't from viruses but from users bogging down their system with a host of applications that all are written as though they are the most important thing you have to do with your clock cycles... antivirus and anti-malware programs being the most ironically insidious of them all. Many a time a family member asked me to fix their PC for being slow, certain that they'd caught whatever virus was in the news lately, only to find that they'd dropped a boat anchor on their CPU with a poorly designed antivirus/anti-malware program that was eating up 60-80% of their system resources (I'm looking at you, Norton!) or worse... had more than one antivirus running at the same time! (ug!)
Over the years I've used a number of different utilities to clean actual viruses off of PCs, the most useful being a Linux distro on a bootable thumb drive with good virus detection software installed. Still, as as been pointed out, this is a very rare occurrence anymore... especially on Win-based OSs. Most trojans and malware now are written for iOS or Android since people are not only using than more than PCs now-a-days, but are much more likely to overlook putting a good antivirus app on their phone... even if they are paranoid about viruses on their PC. (if they even have a PC) This is made worse by the OS makers themselves who are already collecting a grotesque amount of data on their users... with their tacit permission... that can be all too easily co-opted by properly written malware. (which won't slow down the system as they're designed to try and be as invisible as possible and are thus coded to be very efficient with their use of system resources)
The best defense against system lag is a good clean sweep of installed applications, updating to the most stable release of all programs, (as determined by user feedback, not what the company says regarding what version you should be running) and cleaning out junk files. (especially old browser caches... as they like to hold on to files from the first time you went online and every page you've looked at since) If you're set on it being an actual virus, then it should be notable as being unusual.
As a former IT professional, I am so glad you went to the trouble to ask for help on this! Nothing can slam the brakes on a good story faster than when you read something that you know is poorly researched. (I give you Hollywood gems like "Hackers", "Unthinkable", or "Arrow" for examples of poor research into hacking by screenwriters) It's like reading a story set in the 90s, only to have the main character check their messages on their smartphone. (the first true smartphone, the original iPhone, wasn't launched until 2007)
So... thanks!
Roberta
Add in the inexorable rise in Bloatware
that increases with every Windows update and you have a system that is doomed from the outset.
As the sheer amount of bloat grows and MS deems that your system has to have increasing levels of telemetry (aka Phone Home with every keystroke you make) it is less and less under your control.
I'd even go as far as to say that MS owns your system.
I gave up on MS in 2016 but the issues that my friends are having with it just multiply.
Samantha
In over my head
As I began to write that portion I quickly realized that I was in over my head. I'm pretty good at maintaining my two computers and have a good antivirus software running. The last time I would have considered myself a computer whiz would have been pre-windows. I got into computers when CPM was the most common operating system and went through the transition to DOS. I became a DOS whiz and could make it sit up and do trick. However I got out of it for about a year and a half and when I came back, I was barely computer literate. I've never truly caught up.
So when I found myself floundering, I thought, I have access to some really good IT people who appreciate TG fiction, why not let them advise me.
Thanks for your response.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Sorry - I had a smartphone
Sorry - I had a smartphone long before the ROKR-E1 (the iTunes phone), or the iPhone. I owned a Kyocera QCP-6035, which was a Palm Pilot smart phone. That was the last phone I owned before they flipped me to a colour screen, which meant I could no longer go a day without a charger. From that point on, I had to carry a car charger for all of my phones.
Also, iPhone was originally a Motorola owned trademark. Apple brought it out and publicized it before they'd finalized the ownership paperwork for the name. I'd bet there was someone looking for the unemployment line after that fiasco. It was an amusing time in the tech world.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
PDAs
I remember the Palm Pilot and similar devices like the "Crack"berry. In point of fact, I worked for AT&T (formerly Cingular) wireless Tech Services when these were in common use. (early 2000s) I don't consider PDA-phone combos true smartphones, though. They were just mobile phones that could run a few proprietary built-in applications (like extremely limited web browsers that could only view a handful of websites specifically designed for viewing on PDAs) and the PDA functions were separate from the phone software, just using the phone as a modem. Like them or hate them, (I despise them, myself) the iPhone was the first true smartphone with the ability to download new apps that were made by 3rd-party creators with full support... essentially a really tiny PC. (not many people know that the iPhone actually began development under the combined efforts of Apple and Cingular Wireless, both companies working to solve the integration problem that kept PDA-phone hybrids from being more than interesting toys)
Sure, the Palm Pilot could do a lot of things a smartphone could later do, but they could only access websites specifically designed for PDAs and had next to no ability to run new applications... just what came on the device when it was sold... occasionally getting software and firmware updates that added new functionality, but not always or often. (and any custom 3rd-party apps the custom might install were a violation of the EULA, voided the warranty, and if you called TSD with an issue and they found out you had a custom 3rd-party app installed they would immediately halt all troubleshooting and advise the customer that they voided their service agreement and the agent couldn't help resolve their issue... even if it was totally unrelated to the 3rd-party app)
That may seem to be a minor quibble, but to those in the field at the time, the difference was drastic... especially on the back end of the service. For the first time, users weren't limited by the software the manufacturer chose to include and the phone software was fully integrated into the PDA software as a complete system... allowing the user to use their phone the way we see it used to this day... as a fully functional PC.
Thanks for the trip back to that time!
Roberta
Can't get on with Apple. I
Can't get on with Apple. I phones having to pay for a ringtone when you already own the mp3? Slowing down old phones to save the battery? Yet they have an army of followers that would buy a turn if they put i in front of it.
Where's the headphone socket on my iphne 7? Oh thats because we want to sell you Bluetooth headphones. But I just paid £30 for my skulcandy wired ones. Well they are iheadpones. OK since you said i , I'll buy it. See it's better.
Leeanna
Ancient Smartphones
I had various Symbian Phones, Palm Treo (Both Palm OS and WinCE versions) and several HTC OEM'd WinCE phones before I eventually begrudgingly went with a Refurbished/Rooted iPhone 3G because it was the cheapest option at that time, that would do what I needed (after being rooted). I remember my first T-Mobile Android as well :)
Resources
Are like little mailboxes in MS Windows. Every time one opens a program a mailbox is stuffed with that program. Not sure how MS is handling it now but when one closed the program the mailbox remained stuffed. To make it simple let's say MS had one hundred mailboxes. After opening one hundred programs, didn't even need to be a different program just reopen one after it had been closed, new mailbox. All the mailboxes are stuffed so MS goes to using the HD for storage and resources.
Would bring the fastest computer to a crawl, really slow crawl. Kelli called me saying her computer had almost stopped. I asked her when was the last time she shut down and rebooted. "Two or three months." "You used up all your resources. Reboot the beast. It clears your stash where Windows is filing past programs you have opened." She did and called me back, her computer was running as good as new.
I don't have to worry about them things as "RURAL ELEC" shuts down with voltage outage often enough they clean my computer for me, provided MS still has that problem. The Apple people never ran into that problem as Mac cleans the resource mailbox when the open program is closed. Yay, for Apple. Wish they hadn't stolen mine out of the shop. Oh well.
Hugs Roberta,
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
I had a problem with Arrow
I had a problem with Arrow due to the archey.
Leeanna
Needs a virus name not analysis of her machine
Patty is writing a story (fiction) and would like the name of a virus that would slow everything to a crawl. More than you wanted to know if you aren't into the bowls of the beast yourself.
Hugs Patricia
Virus names
https://clario.co/blog/guide-to-computer-virus-names/
Top ten worse virus in history
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/top-ten-worst-compu...
Symptoms of Malware and how it can slow your computer
https://www.webroot.com/us/en/resources/tips-articles/malwar...
Rootkits are viruses which invade the operating system at the basic level
They invest themselves in the EPROM or OS
https://heimdalsecurity.com/blog/rootkit/
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
More than one cause/issue
I recently worked on a friend's computer that was very slow. It had multiple issues. She was running two antivirus programs in active mode as Roberta mentioned. There was a corrupted Windows update file so the update would just spin and use system resources. I also believe there's another corrupted file as it has slowed down again, but I'm waiting for her to leave me the laptop for an afternoon.
Note: I have two antivirus programs installed on my laptop, however only one is active. The second program I only use in batch mode to occasionally run an extra virus scan in the background. I started that after getting infected a couple of times years ago. Antivirus programs are only as good as their latest updates and not all programs are updated for the newest viruses at the same time. For your story you may want a user who has failed to update their antivirus program for a long time and therefore is vulnerable to infection.
"Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart
Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams." Mary Ellen Kelly
Antivirus
Indeed, in my story, the user is a total novice and my protagonist will ask her about her antivirus program and she will give him a blank stare as if he were talking a foreign language. When he's cleared her computer, he'll set her up with a free version and recommend she invest it the full version. She's been relying on what came with the computer. She got the computer while in college and to save money she never subscribed to anything that didn't come with.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Sounds good
Except for the part about "recommend she invest it the full version." For a time, I ran my own computer consulting business... RE-Computing. In all the years I did that, I never recommended to a client that they buy the full version of any of the major antivirus packages. In point of fact, I would always recommend they not use one of the major "name brand" utilities for the exact reason I outlined above... bloat and lag.
When Norton first came out as a free antivirus utility, it was great. Sleek, fast, and effective. I used Norton Utilities on a daily basis to fix clients' problems. Then they went to a paid service and suddenly running NAV was, as I mentioned, like dropping a giant digital boat anchor on your CPU... causing severe system lag at the worst times. (not to mention the constant nag-ware of trying to up-sell the user on other Norton products every few hours) So I switched to recommending McAffee, which at the time was free, fast, and effective. Then they went to being a pay service and the same thing happened all over again... bloat, lag, nag. So I switched to Avast... and it happened again when they went "professional". By that time I wasn't in the IT field anymore, but to this day I stick to the "off-brand" AV solutions like Panda or Kaspersky. They're just better and less intrusive. (they have pay versions, but their free versions work just as effectively) Not saying you should mention the AV packages by name, because that will "date" the story, (today's good AV package will be tomorrow's bloatware) but just drop the recommendation for the "full" version. It sounds less realistic to my ear.
Hope that helps!
Roberta
Windows is Bloat Ware Also
I'm running Win 10 without all the frills and it is a darn fast OS, loads in a heart beat. Purchased the slimmed down package from Germany, trashed the 10 on the computer and installed. There is also a program that will do that but it removes too much and Win becomes useless. It is called Decrapifier. I turned off all updates on virtually everything, Browsers, 10, Virus Hunters after 10 lost my laser printer after the update. Never did get it back, the printer, even after installing all the new drivers. A whole bunch of people had the same problem and it wasn't just my HP printer they turned into a boat anchor. So..., I left the printer hooked to Win XP and Win 7 computers where it works just fine. Purchased a new HP with installation software and it's doing beautifully working with 10.
Used to write DOS and rewrite Win programs a long time in the past. I have no idea what I'm doing now, but not messing with rewriting programs. I just try and find enough info on the net to make Win behave and one of those is not letting it update and screw everything up again, run my virus programs everyday and wish we were still in DOS where I knew what I was doing. I could clear everything up without help back then. Oh well such is life.
Hugs Roberta
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
What about those rogue TSR's then?
and all the other issues we used to have getting DOS workable.
Only joking.
I fought Windows and its stupidity for over 20 years. I was in Iceland when W95 was released and even there, the queues were around the block. After W2000, it was downhill apart from W7 which could be tamed into playing ball.
W8, 8.1, 10 and 11 just accelerated the race to the bottom. More bloat. More spyware and less choice. Do it Microsoft's way or not at all became the modern mantra.
I called it a day with Windows in 2016. No more fighting the insanity of MS.
As an aside, I powered up my PDP-11/84 the other day. RSX-11M+ is a nice OS from back in the days when things were simple and it wasn't all about advertising and slurping of your data at every opportunity.
Samantha
Yer Yanking my Chain
PDP-11/84, RSX-11M+ ? Never heard of the beast. Had to go searching to understand you were talking about a different breed of not only computers but computer language. I worked with a Tandy Radio Shack OS for a while and was writing programs for that puppy but not enough to get tainted. They never found a niche with the public and went the same way as IBM DOS which I still have programs for. A friend gave me a computer which used huge floppies CM I think? I never fired it up. So many OS systems out there in the beginning.
Hugs Sam,
Barb
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
Yep, I'm yanking yer chain
But I go back a lot farther than that. I used the following in the 1970's, 80's and 90's
George 3 (ICL 1901A Mainframe)
RSTS/E, RT-11, WPS-8, TOPS-10, TOPS-20. and of course VAX/VMS
Ultrix, OSF/1, Digital Unix, AT&T Unix V7
(20 years working for DEC helped)
WPS-8 was designed for the DEC PDP-8E to run a word processor. I have it running as an emulation on a Raspberry PI.
Now I only macOS and Linux.
Samantha
I'm STILL having to
I'm STILL having to occasionally deal with a custom database system written in PICK.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Norton Commander
Back in the XT and AT age, I had two floppies that were full of tools for troubleshooting computers. If I remember correctly, my business partner got them from Norton, but I maybe miss remembering. That was 40 years ago. I called it my bag of tricks. At the time I was running a small computer consulting business custom building PC clones. I was hitting niche markets and using a relational data base called dBase IV to write software to fill their needs. I used that for their niche needs. I had a program called Genifer that generated that base code and all I needed to do was fill in the name of the fields of the data base and define the relationship. The program would design the input and output screens. Then I'd write the stuff to fill in the clients needs. I had a library of procedures that I could plug in to the code, mix and match fashion. I had another program that would reduce dBase code to and .EXE file in a two step process. The result was a stand alone (dBase IV required a runtime) program that ran much faster than the dBase IV w/runtime would.
Back in the day, I was running Norton anti-virus. When they came out with what I remember as Norton Commander, it tried to take over the computer. Every time I wanted to install a program, it would question me, moving a file from one directory to another... anything and everything Norton didn't trust me to do anything on my own. It went from a program that ran in the back ground to being in command. I dumped it in favor of the free Avast. For about two days, Avast combed my hard drive. The only time I knew it was there was when it would find something that Norton had missed, it would then give me a two second popup to tell me what it did with it. for that two day stretch, it seemed that at least once ever hour it would find something. Then it calmed down and ran totally in the background. My son-in-law put me onto Avast and reported a similar experience. He had been running McAfee.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Norton Commander
Was a utilities disc and programs for maintaining your computer. It had one of the best file managers ever written. What it did not have was Norton AV. That was a different program that was sold seperately. You could have one without the other. NC was the gold standard for utilities. About half the freeware or shareware incorporated "Commander" in their name, trying to steal a little bit of glory from NC. Never happened.
But Symantic got greedy. First they bundled NC with NAV. Then they started stripping functions from NC and adding them to NAV. Then they finally trashed NC completely. We lost a lot of good utility programs when that happened. NAV became bloatware and performed at a mediocre level. They quit using the Norton name completely; and most of us learned not to buy anything flying the Symantic flag.
If I recall correctly Jim (?) Norton went completely bonkers about that time. He left the US to avoid a federal investigation. For several years he was presumed dead, but was finally located somewhere in South America living like a total beach bum. This may explain what happened to Norton Utilities, I don't know.
But god, I miss Norton Commander!
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
Peter Norton, if it helps.
Peter Norton, if it helps.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
What you need
What you need is total commander (https://www.ghisler.com/). It may be customized to look exactly like old good NC.
XTree Gold FTW
Seriously, everything NC could do, XTG did better.
I used it as my primary means of file management until I moved to the Win platform finally... in 1999. It was in my stack of diagnostics disks and as soon as I booted a system I'd bring it up and breeze through file and folder structures no matter how convoluted the user made them. (even if they stored everything in ZIP files... which XTG read natively) I never needed Win 3.11 or Win95 because I could pwn DOS like a pro with XTG and my super-optimized CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files. (my 286 system startup had 621k of lower memory available by installing all my TSRs into UMB to provide mouse and CD support, as well as a 16k EMS shadowing block for full XMS/EMS emulation of high memory... yes, I was one of those IT geek girls!)
Yes, that means I went directly from DOS 6.22 to Win98SE. The next time I upgraded OSes was when I moved from 98SE to Win7 Ultimate 64... and I haven't gone beyond that. If and when that no longer functions, I'll likely move to a flavor of Linux as I don't really care for machines that tell me how my system will be run. I am the user... I get to decide that... not some committee at M$ that just wants me to have to pay a yearly fee for the 'privilege' of running their bug-ridden crapware that doesn't run as well as the same software actual MS programmers wrote in the 90s. (seriously, I still run Office 97 because it can handle Excel spreadsheets that Office365 chokes on because they're too complex)
Ah, the heady days when 4 megabytes of memory and a 20 meg HD seemed impossibly huge...
...I am now officially old!
Hugs,
Roberta
Hmmm
Have to look into that!
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
Norton Commander was the VERY
Norton Commander was the VERY useful File explorer utility that Norton came up with for MS-DOS.
In the late 90's, I had a big go bag as well, a stack of floppies (mostly 3.5 at that point), and a VERY useful Epson built Iomega Zip drive, Parallel. I used a floppy to load the driver, then BANG, 80 floppies worth of storage popped up.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Plot device
If your fictional user is not computer savvy, then, when the IT guru starts explaining, just quote some techno speak from Star Trek and go something like “at least that is what is sounded like to me, and it made even less sense then that” and be done with it.
Anne Margarete
Don't get into the hole where you have to stop digging
There are some seriously clever people studying seriously clever subjects. Don't even contemplate that in just one blog you can become as clever as they are in their own subject.
When you know absolutely nothing in a subject, it's dangerous to try to fool the cleverest. You ain't going to do it and it simply destroys the integrity of your story. The less you say, the less likelihood of making serious mistakes.
My own advice is to stick within your own competence levels. If you need advice on this level, I suggest you change the story. Rather easier than becoming an IT expert good enough to fool the experts.
That's just it
I don't want to fool anybody. I will keep that part of the story as simple as possible. I am in a PM with a current tech with lots of curing laptop ills experience. He's agreed to advise me. We've collaborated on stories before, but not something technical. What I want is simply to do it put in a scene where a laptop with a problem is cured as a devise to get my protagonist and a girl in the same room together so that the plot line can move forward. What he and others have advised and what I wanted all along is to say as little as possible about the computer repair. The story is not about computer repair. What I wanted was for someone to check what I do say about it to be in the realm of possibility. My advisor is helping me make it look like what is said is an IT tech dumbing down what's going on to satisfy the computer owners questions about what's being done without using any techno speak. The actual repair of the computer happens, as they say in Hollywood, off camera.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann