Laptop Repair

I've been spending the evening as tech service, fixing up my mother's laptop and everything.  She is not very well-versed when it comes to knowing what and what not to download, so it turns out she had some quite nasty malware/spyware on there.  My dad was having some trouble with it, it seemed, so I took over after he said Chrome all of a sudden disappeared and IE wasn't connecting to anything.  I may not know a lot about computers in terms of hardware or coding, but I usually am adequate at least about cleaning things up in terms of this kind of crap.

At least, I think so.  I'm sure a person better at this kind of thing will say otherwise, but I am adequate enough for what was needed, I guess.

I went in and tried to uninstall as many things as possible from the control panel, but these things can be irritating about that, so I went into the program files to manually start getting rid of things.  I got rid of as much as I could manually, and then started up IE without any add-ons, and then it seemed to work.  So the first thing I did was re-download Chrome, and from there, I installed Avast, since it was clear that whatever antivirus software my mom had (if any), it really wasn't doing the trick.  However, once I started it up and tried to use the browser cleanup with it, the computer crashed.

So then of course I had to wait for repairs to be made on the next startup.  When I was able to get back to the main screen, it appeared that Chrome and Avast had both disappeared, so I went and reinstalled those.  However, instead of doing the browser cleanup for IE (which I was doing mostly as a precaution because with Chrome being reinstalled there really is no need for IE at all), I downloaded a restart application from Microsoft's website.  After that ran and I restarted the computer (there were actually many restarts throughout this whole process), I let a scan run through Avast while I took the pups for a very rainy and cold walk.  When I returned, it was pretty much done, and had found I think 9 or so more issues that I missed, so I went to delete those.  I then restarted again and decided to run a fuller scan before Windows actually started up so that is what is happening right now.

I feel kind of techy.  And again, I'm aware all this is probably not really that impressive but it still is cool that I can do something like this for my parents and stuff.


In other words, Supernatural had me freaking out tonight, and I once again have no sense of time and I did nothing all day as a result.