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The other day my mother-in-law dropped off her laptop and said, “it doesn’t work” and left. It took me a day to get to it but when I powered up the system it came up with this message, “windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM”

My heart sank as I had a few other FUN things planned for the evening. This laptop is a Dell Inspiron with the Medial Edition of XP with SP3 installed. I still do not understand why OEM’s or the Best Buys, Office Depot stores, etc. do not install the XP Recovery Console on ALL systems but let’s move on!!!

I had planned on spending a few hours reinstalling the OS (as a last result) and going from there. However, the first thing I usually try is the XP repair option (in the event of corruption or a bad spot on the hard drive), before going further so I put in a Dell OEM XP CD and restarted the laptop. I had already made sure that the BIOS was set to look to the CD drive to boot first, then if none found move to hard drive. The XP setup started and when all of the files loaded it came up and asked me to install or repair and of course I wanted the repair / recovery console option. This brought me to a command prompt, or black dos-like screen.

The system then asked which partition, or which Windows install I wanted to repair (or recover). I chose (1) Windows since it was the only OS on the one partition hard drive and then I was given a command prompt. Here’s is where I was pleasantly surprised!

The first thing I wanted to check was the health of the hard drive so I typed, “chkdsk /R” at the command prompt. After (40) minutes the system was finished with the check disk utility and informed me it had found some “bad data” and moved it. Since the system was now back at the command prompt, I crossed my fingers and restarted. The laptop came up fine, back to the XP Media Center desktop and my work was done. Well, almost. I immediately installed the recovery console option and change the “timeout” to (3) seconds.

My night was salvaged after all and everyone is happy!

I got lucky with this laptop, since the chkdsk issue resolved the problem. This is not always the case and a fresh OS install is all too common. You can search the MS site for articles on restoring the registry, making batch files to save time, etc. Again, I got lucky and expected the worse but it turned out OK.

Just a quick link with some good information on funny videos….

http://www.cithere.com

Lots of links and info!!!

There is a site where you can watch (and / or) download past AND recent movie releases.   We did experience a pop-up ad after closing out of one of movies but not much to complain about if the movies are FREE!

Here’s a link to the movies.

$10 Off Any Order for Black Friday – Cyber Monday at TheNerds.net!

The Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) is a small program Microsoft pushes out to computers on Patch Tuesday to clean out a list of malware. On this month’s Patch Tuesday, Microsoft added scans for a malware file that masks itself as security software, and it found plenty of copies.

Win32/FakeSecSen has gone by various names, including Micro Antivirus 2009, MS Antivirus, Spyware Preventer, Vista Antivirus 2008, Advanced Antivirus, System Antivirus 2008, Ultimate Antivirus 2008, Windows Antivirus, XPert Antivirus, Power Antivirus, and Ultra Antivirus 2009. Furthermore, it is skinnable, so each of these variants has a different GUI, although the basic functionality is the same: bother users with warnings of malware until they pay up.

The Microsoft Malware Protection Center recently released some data on how the removal tool performed this month: FakeSecSen was removed from 994,061 machines. That number isn’t the highest Microsoft has recorded before, and the number of removals depends on which malware Microsoft adds each month and how widespread it is.

The company did note, however, that for every one thousand machines in the US scanned by MSRT during the last seven days, roughly five were infected with FakeSecSen rogues. That’s quite high for just one piece of malware, but things could have been much worse, according to Microsoft:

Normally each FakeSecSen installation contains one EXE, one or two DAT files, one Control Panel applet (CPL), one desktop shortcut and sometimes one uninstaller. It is interesting that only 20 percent of these removals contain executables of FakeSecSen. This indicates either the other 80 percent had at one point been infected by FakeSecSen and the threat was then manually and partially removed, or the machines were cleaned by other AV products/tools, or FakeSecSen had failed to install, etc.

Once Microsoft gets into the game of free real-time antivirus solutions, it will be worth watching how infection rates fare, instead of just taking note of cleanup numbers each month.

Thanks to the folks at arstechnica.com for the original article.

The folks at TrainSignal have been offering free training videos for some time now. One of our techs used the TCP/IP Fundamentals series and came away with some great knowledge. This is a great way to learn for people that don’t have time during the day, want to do something else on the side, or just learn something new.
Here is the link to TrainSignal’s offerings in the free video training series.