I am visiting at a friends house or should I say extended families house, last night I started up an older unused computer that is in a little apartment in the basement of the house. Was here a few weeks ago and cleaned the insides of the computer, as well as a couple other and taught the daughter how to maintain the insides of the computer. Used a can of air to blow the dust spider webs out of the fans the front panel. The computer was about 6 years old. A HP a819n model.
This is a very interest little computer, motherboard Asus; 775 socket and a P4 Dual Core processor 2.8 GHz. 4 SATA ports. A 200gig hard drive, interesting that the hard drive has a jumper on the back and mounted flat against the front bottom part of the case. This is the first time I have seen a hard drive mounted this way. Uses the old white 4 pin power plug and not the 15 pin of the new SATA Hard Drives.
I decided that I would try to shrink the C-drive as it was partition at 200gigs. Learned that I would not be able to do so even thought the operating system is XP Home Edition. There is an option in the disk management that is suppose to allow you to do so. Have found it on some computers and not on others and I don't know why. Have used my Spotmau Recovery disk to do so on certain computers in the past.
Before I attempted to do this I defraged the C-drive, after removing the expired Norton's Antivirus and Firewall. Restarting Windows Firewall, installed a free antivirus Microsoft Security Essential (A download from Microsoft) and 8 hours later after several restarts I removed 42 Malware Trojan Horses and virus from this computer.
This is the results of using the computer in the Administrator account and not creating a separate user account to do your every day computing needs. The computer was running very slow for some unknown reason and a new one had been purchased to replace it.
Unfortunately the replacement computer is probably in the same condition. I will need to gently teach the daughter how to save herself a lot of pain in creating a separate user account. There was no password protection of the Administrator account either.
The problem is that she is not alone her first computer, and a darn nice one I speak with people all the time about computers and have learned that there are many, many person who have no IDEA of how to properly protect their data their computers from spyware, malware Trojan horses and virus.
Many think that it is safe to think that you cannot get a virus infection or a Trojan if you have antivirus. Think so will read what Monte Russell wrote on his blog about how his Missus allow her daughter- in- law to use her computer and allowed her to down load a program in the administrator account. Bang in spite of having the best, antivirus she still got one. I follow his blog on this blog and you can search the page from this blog.
If you are interested in getting a copy of his latest book Self Computer Repair, Unleashed just click on the picture on the right side of this blog you will go directly to the web page.
Now if one of the Computer Engineers who worked for a company that helped Microsoft developed XP can get a virus that was so nasty that he could not get rid of it using 3 different Spyware, Trojan Removing and Antivirus. Then you can too. Reinstalling the operating system turned out to be the only solution.
Fortunately he being the computer expert that he is had Images of the operating system that were not too old, and he lost none of the wife's data. Only a day of his life trying to get the bug out.
This is something you should think about. After all it is your computer your online banking, your data, your personal information, that can be stolen but not mine.
What do you think it would have cost my Son's mother-in-law to pay for what I did for free at $75.00 per hour at the local or national computer repair chain store. It took me 8 hours to get all the bugs out and install all of the Microsoft upgrades. Believe me I am not slow.
Was talking to my taxi drive who is from India, I use him all the time to get around Alameda, Calif. when I don't walk or take the bus. Took me to Office Depot today where I purchased a new hard drive for the same computer mentioned in this article.
In route he said that his only computer got a virus and it cost him $165.00 at Best Buy to clean the virus out of his computer. Reason he did not purchase the antivirus before it expired after 60 days trial was over. He now has Norton's AV installed on his computer but is still using the administrator account. I explained to him how to get into his control panel to user accounts and how to set up the limited user account. He was very happy. He had no idea as to how to not get a virus in his computer, but was interested in learning how.
Here is something for you a freebie, the reason I purchased that particular 500 gig hard drive is that it comes in a BOX included the hard drive SATA. power cable adaptor, mounting screws, installation manual ( very complete) and a Software CD that makes a Clone of your old hard drive and creates partition on the new.
It is a Seagate The product number is: 9BD648-553 did your homework for you. You don't need to take it to a geek to install or up grade the hard drive using this hard drive, you can DIY.
Knowledge share it don't keep it. That is why I have this blog. I posted a Question on DIY-computer-repair.com, Question and Answers pages as to why I could not shrink the C-Drive just so that others who go to his site who have had this problem will learn how to do so.
Hope you have enjoyed this post.
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