#3: Sunday
Today, I have done very little. I watched the Bolton vs Blackburn game (Blackburn won basically because they had two penalities given, there wasn’t a lot else to say) and I earnt £40 fixing a computer.
There were three fundamental things wrong with this computer:
1) It was running Windows XP on 128MB of RAM (ouch, swap file thrashing)
2) It was running Norton Antivirus (this is bad, no matter what)
3) Its ADSL modem/router combination had no microfilter between it and the wall socket
I got rid of the expired Norton Antivirus without a second thought and installed the wonderful AVG Free instead. The 128MB of RAM is more a problem, although I advised him that if he wanted his computer to speed up, he could shell out £50 or so and it would be a lot better.
The thing that made me laugh the most was the lack of microfilters in the system. Originally I wasn’t sure what the problem was, because he told me that he doesn’t answer the phone next to the computer any more because whenever he picks it up, it disconnects him from the Internet. This sounded a little odd, so I decided to investigate…
C:\Documents and Settings\User>ping -t webvictim.net
Pinging webvictim.net [80.175.29.126] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=24ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=46
Nothing wrong there at all, everything pretty much as I’d expect it to be. So at this point, I picked up the phone and started to talk into it as though I was answering a call.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Reply from 192.168.1.1: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.1: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.1: Destination host unreachable.
I asked him how long it had been like this and he couldn’t remember. Wouldn’t you have done something about it before now?! I mean… honestly!
I advised him to purchase some microfilters :)