Over the weekend one of my projects was to take a trip to Kingman and help my brother get his computer working again. He had called me on Tuesday or Wednesday of the previous week to let me know that his computer had gotten the Security Tool virus, and was wondering if there was any solution for it.
Essentially, it’s not something I trust myself to fix, so I told him I would try to make a trip down to Kingman to help out by doing what I know how to do — reformatting it. I packed my Windows XP disk and my Dell Dimension 2350 drivers disc, but I also packed my Ubuntu 9.10 disc, thinking that it would help with saving his data to an external disk, as well as potentially becoming the new installed operating system on the machine, as I am indeed well aware that, for someone who knows how to do what they need to with it, Ubuntu Linux has the capability of being a very powerful, stable and secure computing environment.
Unfortunately, I spent an extremely little amount of time either disabling options that shouldn’t have been available, or testing Ubuntu on his hardware before I left. So when Glenn and I got back from a fairly grueling drive back to Flagstaff, it was a natural end to a full day of computer repair, at fairly significant expense to myself, that I received a call from my brother letting me know that he had tried to put his computer into hibernate mode, and that now it wouldn’t boot up.
Naturally, I was incredibly unhappy at having received this news. I had given him the machine 18 months ago, when I could’ve been using it here in Flagstaff to crunch SETI units, be my linux web+shell server, or I could even ahve saved money on the hulu computer by using that machine. Not only did I give it to him, but I’d also upgraded it fairly extensively, to its maximum 2 gigabytes of memory and with a 120 gigabyte disk, and filled it with software that I figured he would find fairly useful. It is a small miracle, I believe, that an installation of Windows XP had lasted 18 months, especially given that he and sometimes his friends use the machine.
At any rate, I still have his data on my external disk, so the initial thought was something like this: “Whatever, I’ll send him tacgnol, at the additional expense to myself, just so that he has something to use.” Then I thought “Well, I could send him the disks and he can reinstall his own OS,” which was followed quickly by “but will he be able to install all of the drivers?” It went on like that for several hours until he called me back the next day letting me know the machine had apparently booted properly that morning. Unfortunately for me, he made the decision to call the following morning and leave a message with no hints as to what was wrong, however indicating fairly strongly that somewhat was indeed wrong, or he wants my help with something I’m unfamiliar with doing — because either nobody else wanted to do it, or because I have set myself up as being the defacto helper.
Either way… when I find out what he wants next, which I unfortunately suspect may be some kind of ploy to get me to expedite the process of upgrading him to the newer, more robust hotbox tower, or sending him tacgnol or der vorlaeufer. Whether or not that’ll happen though is going to be up in the air, as I like having all of those machines around here. Hopefully I’m just overreacting, however.