The things they do
Today I have mostly been cleaning up a friend’s PC.
In fact, technically, I’ve been doing it for a week or so, on and off. Just that mostly it’s been off, because of other commitments.
The initial problem was just your average disk corruption, causing XP to go round in circles and never actually boot. That sorted, the machine was given the once-over and lo and behold, 300+ malware infections. Mostly courtesy of crap installed by the resident teenagers, I suspect. Hey ho. And the malware is sufficiently persistent that removal appears to have trashed the user profile. Which is nice.
I suspect that this one is going to run and run. Unlike the computer.
So, to any parent who’s tempted to say about their teenage offspring “Ah, they know so much more about computers than us, don’t they?” … no. No they don’t. Not where it counts. Much like drinking, drugs, sex and getting into trouble, just because they’re more familiar with the basics on a daily basis than you are now, it doesn’t mean they actually know what they’re doing.
And now, back to the disinfectant and the PC penicillin ..