the “computer repair for a friend” scheduled for this morning 08:30 cost me 6 hours

• The computer appeared incredibly slow,
• it appeared to me, that unwanted pop-ups showed up in the browsers (IE + Firefox),
• removing McAfee seemed impossible (we wanted to replace it with proper AV software);
• after like 2 hours I decided, the notebook was highly infected and need restoring from the recovery partition;
• restoring from the recovery partition cost quite some time,
• installing the software, that the friend wanted (Firefox, Adobe reader, …), cost also some time,
• the pre-installed Skype was impossible to set up,
• so Skype also needed a standard installation;
• I also suggested to install adblock software for Firefox and Chrome (the friend had no idea, what adblock software does, and oviously he never had it installed before)
• …

Root cause analysis:

• the computer is like 6 months old
• the antivirus software (McAfee) is most likely outside the trial-period,
• so the AV software itself was probably outdated (“not now”),
• I assume the full disk scan got never run (“not now”),
• the AV detection list got never updated as well (“not now”);
• by my experience the system will be in the same bad state in less than 4 weeks.

Of course, the friend also needed some kind of entertainment during the waiting periods, so I was not able to fill the gaps with my own work and the things I usually do.

After I had all that achieved and the friend has left, another friend asked me through IM, how (nice) my day has been so far, and I started typing into Google Hangouts, but I decided to stop that, make my description an article (THIS article), and refer her to this article.

Good advises and a few comments to whoever reads this:

• keep your AV software system itself up-to-date,
• let it update itself, and (almost) never reject its wish to do so;
• let the AV software keep its configuration data up-to-date on a daily basis, i.e. its malware detection patterns etc;
• let the AV scanner run on a daily basis;
• do not prevent the AV guard from running;
• if you do not obey to these rules,
• you will most likely have to erase your hard disk and recover your OS,
• i.e. you will lose the data stored on your disk,
• and either you know how to do this yourself,
• then this will cost you at least like an entire day of work,
• or you will have to ask a friend, who will have to spend like at least half a day,
• if you are lucky, your friends keeps smiling, otherwise this can get rather loud and aggressive – and pls don’t ask why!

Another friend cost me only like 3 hours recently on a Saturday night with a totally outdated Linux system incl. the Firefox. It took a while to get aware of all the different problems, incl. missing passwords for the root account and for e-mail accounts as well. The friend then made me stop my work entirely w/o any achievements but the diagnosis at all after 01:00 in the morning IIRC.

For the time being I will only do this for money, I mean for real money:

• ie. analysis and diagnosis,
• recovery,
• system set-up.

These occasions were good reminders to tell me how I don’t want to operate.