a computer repair for the books

[Donald]

I was repairing a laptop yesterday and its one for the books. The computer had The "United States Cyber Security" virus that holds your computer hostage saying you violated copyright laws and you need to pay a $100.00 fine.

I booted my test opersys from CD but none of the virus tools found it. So I pulled the harddrive out and connected it to my laptop as an external and scanned it with ESET and Malewarebytes. They each found a few and when I put it back in the laptop everything was fine.

I needed to use his laptop to enter some tech info online and the keyboard is full of crumbs and 1/3 of the keys do not work. I tried some "air in a can" to blow out the crumbs but that did not help much. The guy (handicapped) uses a mouse and an onscreen keyboard. It works but its awfully slow. But the mouse was setup left handed. It took me about 15 minutes to enter stuff that should have taken 5 minutes. I was happy to help and he was happy the virus was gone.

But another reminder for people. When you buy a laptop, make a copy of the Windows key on the bottom of the computer. His was there but unreadable. Maybe it gets hot where they placed the sticker. If I had to rebuild the oper sys with my OEM copy, I would not have had a key (that I could read).

 

[tommygunn]

Also read all your manuals, alot of laptops these days require you to burn 3-4 DVD's of your factory operating system image. It really sucks to restore to factory when your hard drive is pooched and these disks aren't burned. But yeah; heat and the fact the bottom gets handled alot of laptops; I've never had the CD Key stickers last.

 

[GumbyJarvis]

My laptop, HP, Press hold down F11 on startup, boom, reset to factory settings

 

[tommygunn]

Won't help if the hard drive gets corrupt. The entire factory image is stored there. Burn your disks.

 

[BearZDefect]

What Tommy wrote is true, you need to make those recovery disks in case the hard disk crashes.

Along the lines of what Donald wrote, some malware digs into the operating system deep enough that the easiest way to clean it is to remove the disk and have it scanned as an accessory disk by a known clean OS setup.

Sure, you could do a fresh setup of Windows or your OEM recovery, but then you have many hours of work to reinstall your applications, recover your data and configurations, etc.

 

[thescreensavers]

Id rather just download the clean W7 Image from Microsoft and use the key and reinstall the drivers. Eliminating all the [censored] that comes from the manufacturer.

If you cant get the CD-key from the laptop, you can get it from within windows. Speccy for instance will show you the CD-key

 

[SLCraig]

Originally Posted By: thescreensavers
Id rather just download the clean W7 Image from Microsoft and use the key and reinstall the drivers. Eliminating all the [censored] that comes from the manufacturer.

If you cant get the CD-key from the laptop, you can get it from within windows. Speccy for instance will show you the CD-key


I agree with you on this. I prefer a spartan install with no MFR stuff, but using the MFR discs is definitely easiest for most people. I had to use the MFR image on my X120E once because the HDD cloning failed and bricked both drives somehow. It got me up and running with no hassles.. Luckily their OEM installation is actually fairly lightweight in terms of un-needed junk.

 

[BearZDefect]

True. There is always junk bundled in by the OEM, although some of the extras can be useful. How bad it is depends on the OEM. Lenovo is not too bad. Sony is bad, but the worst I've seen recently is Toshiba where the system restore from DVD installed Windows 7 (on an friend's i5 laptop with new SSD) quickly then spent the next hour installing all the junkware and I had no way to stop it. I was amazed at how shameless they can be. Boo Toshiba!

 

[Donald]

For my personal laptop I use Windows Backup (including image copies) on a weekly basis to my external RAID and have the one CD I need to make that work in a restore situation..

 

[Colt45ws]

I think it is rubbing that causes the key to disappear. The Key is gone on my EeePC Ive noticed. Thats okay because I never even booted XP. It came out of the box and booted a Gentoo boot key. But yeah, Ive started copying keys off of laptops.