Things that happened last week

Sometimes when it rains it pours.

Last week was like that - computers were having problems all around me, as as I am the person everyone around me turns to when that happens (I'm sure many of you can relate), they all became my problems.

There were three major incidents plus a hardware-related fourth more or less at the same time. The stories of the three are, I think, somewhat enlightening - especially as to the inertia Windows users show when it comes to something other than living with Windows problems.

First was a Win XP computer which had developed a glitch that was most probably hardware-related; after much fiddling the harddisk with the system and personal files was transferred to a different computer which of course threw XP out of whack. In the end I had to reinstall.

The original computer had come with Win XP of course, and it had had troubles previously, I am sure someone else had to reinstall it at least once previously. The trouble now was that the original installation disk was one of XP prior to SP1. While I was able to install that one using the product key provided with it, no SP would install because the service packs did not accept that key as genuine. Who knows how this number ended up on Microsoft's bad side, but the fact remains: the system could not be made any more modern than XP without SPs, while the antivirus and firewall (which had worked on the borked previously installed system, so some SPs would have to have been installed there) would ask for SP 2 and 3 respectively in order to work.

In the end of course, because the computer had to be available quickly for writing job applications, I installed Ubuntu 9.04, having to use ndiswrapper for the AVM WLAN stick and write a short callup script for Skype with a prepended call to some v4l compatibility library so that it could make use of the cheap webcam, but all in all including the troubleshooting this took less time than it took to install Win XP up to the point when the trouble started.

The owner of the computer had been pretty skeptical, but I suppose that has changed now; and her six-year-old figured out how to start Firefox in the new system in no time.

Next, a colleague told me that his bank had barred him from online banking because he had, according to their information, a trojan. I have since found out that indeed some German banks appear to have contracts with service companies which monitor internet traffic and filter out trojan packages which contain account information, then notify the banks.

My colleague had already removed some infected elements from his system with his antivirus. The program had not, however, removed the calls from the registry, so now he had three error messages on bootup and no idea what to do about them. Now, someone more experienced would have tried to use regedit to find those calls, but regedit was disabled; the trojan had set a value in the registry to 1 which prohibited editing of the registry.

First, I scanned the whole system from a bootable Linux CD (incidentally from the same vendor the antivirus system my collegaue used came from) and found six further infected files which I then removed manually. Hijackthis took care of virus-related registry entries, included the one mentioned above. After three hours of work I was pretty sure that the system was now clean again.

But my colleague is still content to return to online banking using Internet Explorer instead of a more secure, not browser-related way to do online-banking, let alone consider to switch to Linux at least for such important online work. Even though he repeatedly said that he would never have been able to solve any of this on his own he would rather risk getting into the same trouble all over again than try something new.

Third, someone gave me an HP notebook on which Vista had originally been installed, but her son had removed it in favour of XP (he'd rather have installed Linux, but she didn't want that). The son being a continent away at present she turned to me when she found that there was no support for her network adapter in XP - actually there were five more hardware problems, two of those related to high definition audio, no surprise there, the others to other parts of the chipset. HP tech support hadn't been able to help, didn't even state what network adapter the box had. All documentation spoke of 'Ethernet' but nothing any more precise.

So I booted Ubuntu on it. Needless to say, everything worked right out of the box. Dmesg told me we had a forcedeth chip on our hands, so we eventually downloaded a driver package from nvidia which worked like a breeze and removed all the problems except the audio ones, but I expect there are no drivers for XP for that, it being a province of Vista's DRM shackles.

I also showed her Open Office 3 while we were at it, to show her that it was indeed closer to the MS Office she was used to than the MS Office 2007 she had to get acquainted with now, reluctantly.

But would any of that convince her to give Linux even a try? Nope. 'I have no time to learn something entirely new' she said, as if Linux required her to learn alchemy first. She would rather spend her time battling the same old Windows problems forever than investing it into getting rid of those problems once and for all.

It would be ok if Windows users were able to solve their own problems, but mostly they aren't. They still steal our time with always the same problems, we solve them for them, but when we tell them how to avoid them for good, they just return to business as usual - after all, they have us to solve their problems for them.