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I had a bad day yesterday, but got things straightened out last night. My daughter brought her laptop home from college because it seemed to have a virus. The symptom was hanging during boot-up, and reporting that files were missing or corrupt. The last two times I saw this happen, a rootkit virus wiped out the hard drive so badly that we had to buy new computers. In one case I paid $700 to recover about 20% of the files on the drive.
So this time I had told her not to try any further boots, and just bring it home. I removed the mini-drive from the laptop, got an adapter cable and mounted it in my machine as a second drive. I let Norton Antivirus work on it for several hours, then copied all the files to my drive. After re-installing it in her computer it booted fairly normally, with the message that Windows had recovered from a serious error.
Having that problem out of the way, I tackled her second complaint: that the computer has not been able to connect to the Internet for the past several months. After trying several different combinations of router settings, cables, and reset sequences, I lost all Internet capabilites for all our computers. The whole day was spent trying to troubleshoot this. It's no wonder that nearly 50% of all routers are returned to the store because they are just TOO HARD to get working. And this was a router that was just working a few minutes before. Well, after about 10 hours of trying I finally got the right combination of settings, cabling, and startup-sequences.
I even (accidentally) found the problem with her Internet capability. MSN Explorer just WOULD NOT connect even though the system seemed to have a strong wireless signal. Out of desperation, I happened to click on Mozilla, and Bang!, it connected. So I did a Google search for "Why will my computer connect to the Internet with Mozilla, but not MSN Explorer?", and amazingly, got some valuable hits. One mentioned proxy server settings, so I researched how to check those. There was an IP address set as a Proxy in Internet Options, so I removed it. The problem instantly disappeared.
A very frustrating day, but at least it's over and I'm back to work on MA3.
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