I have gave up. I just informed the dude that he has lost it all and I am
reinstalling windows. I am saving all his files but programs and everything
else is gone. I have almost 6 hours in this now and I have managed to get
rid of maybe 75% of the junk. process are down from 86 to the low 40s and
the cpu no longer stays maxed out but I still can not get a browser to run
for over a minute without crashing and trying to start with popups all on
its own.
While I sympathize for your lost time, I recommend that next
time you take an all-or-nothing approach, to not spend even
20 minutes before deciding if you're going to stick it out
and fix whole thing or stop then and copy off data and do
the clean install.
Most useful is to have a antivirus/utilities/etc CD or
thumbdrive prepared ahead of time, not only for their system
but general purpose, there's always a chance that you too
are at risk even with safe computing practices if you are
exposed to certain common scenarios (like IE and the recent
WMF vulnerability, fortunately patched now).
Any, often it's best to state up front to (a customer?) that
it "might" (emphasize might) be possible to recover the
system but that it will cost more than a clean reinstall
would, then let them decide if they'd foot the bill, and
then if you find problems, you also may have the decision of
whether to stick it out and spend more time for the $
difference, or not.
Just a curiosity question for any of you in the business for a living.
1) What would you charge to reinstall XP? I am thinking about a hundred
dollars.
That sounds a bit steep for a generic windows install,
unless they don't have the driver cds or anything and you
have to hunt all that down yourself, but you may not know
this until you've reinstalled windows to see which devices
it might support with built-in drivers. Personally I always
prefer getting newest drivers from the respective chipset
manufacturer, but if someone wanted the cheapest possible
just-get-it-running fix, I would do as asked.
A typical windows reinstall should be closer to $50 if they
have the drivers. If it's an OEM quickrestore, even less,
maybe $25 as all you have to do is pop the CDs in. If they
expect to supply printer drivers and have you set up the
internet account and 3rd party appliations too, there's a
wide variation in how long that can take, $100 might be
about right.
2) What would your charge to attempt to get rid of all the crapware and
viruses? I do not know how you could do this aside from just with an hourly
charge.I would think this would be more, a lot more.
Hourly is hard to do with such things as there's alot of
just letting scanners do their thing. Maybe $100 if you
have a good relationship with them, BUT some infections are
a simple one-thing-gone-wrong which takes only minutes to
fix if you had a prepared media with tools, while others
turn into this marathon multi-hour situation instead.
Better to give a ballpark figure with the stipulation that
you'll contact them after taking a first look at it.
3) Would you offer any guaranty to the person as to functionality of
everything else once the viruses and adware is gone.
Guarantee that you do the job specified, removing the
malware. Note the date and time it's completed as well,
since their personal use of the system might just reinfect
it soon afterwards, but these new files will typically have
newer timestamps.
If you are comfortable with their assertation that the
system worked hardware wise, then you should make sure all
the core hardware functions work when reinstalling windows,
ie- sound, lan, 3D video, etc. If they had installed a
bunch of USB drivers and they impaired that functionality
AND you only cleaned malware off, not a clean reinstall, of
course you should not be required to fix their USB for the
price of a malware removal job. Then again, some people are
purely customers and others are closer to friends, I can
only assume not good friends or family since the $100 is
already mentioned.
I just see this as a computer techs worst nightmare. I would think most
customers would not be happy with the results or the price and likely go
home and do whatever they did to create the problem all over again and then
bring the computer back saying that you had not done the job properly and
want you to do it again for free.
Well, yes. Some people can easily be convinced that it's in
their best interest to pay you an extra $300 to get their
system upgraded, so you've doing more of a pull-old-parts
and clean windows install than a clean-off & fix old
install, job. Of course it varies per situation, they
might need to buy windows again if they had an OEM copy, or
not need more performance, or whatever... and the more
experience you gain cleaning off systems, the better you
will get at it... half of it is knowing common places to
look, things like identifiying the timestamps on at least
"some" of the malware and then seeking other questionable
files with similar timestamp... often one can look in the
windows subdirectory for these files and get rid of a ton of
stuff with the good ole delete button. Not necessarily all
of it, but there's a momentum to it as well, that if you
keep system disconnected from the internet and get rid of
the self-repairing stuff, you can then at least whittle away
at the rest one at a time, making sure nothing is loading
with windows whether it be from RUN command in registry, or
a service, or wherever.
