It's now 2020 and I've aged quite a bit.

Windows 7 Rc1 32 bit

Well, I must say, Windows 7 Rc1 feels snappy.

Now when I was in the podnutz daily Ustream feed, the chat room did not display properly on IE8.

Here is a snap shot of it above . Now when I click on compatability view mode, it's ok.

C:\WINNT\system32\powrprof.dll is the TR/Patched.F01[Fixed]

Hello Guys.

Well, I'm working on a Gateway P4 with Windows XP home edition. It has 760 megs of ram.

The problem is it would hang at the desktop. You could see the hour glass, and move it, but no response on clicking on anything or trying to get into task manager via con,alt,delete.

I could go into safe mode and run Malwarebytes and SuperAntiSpyware with all updates and it all came back clean..Weird huh?

I then went into msconfig, services tab, hid microsofts services and disabled all others. Rebooted and it went to the desktop fine and all is working... I even ran Malwarebytes and SuperAntiSpyware in here and all came back clean.

I went back to msconfig, services and stared to turn things on one at a time. The first I turned on was Avast AntiVirus. Rebooted and it locked up at that desktop.. So, there was my problem. However, I did do a boot time scan with Avast and it found the powrprof.dll Tr/patched.FO1 Trojan, and several others, but it could not do anything as they were system files. Anyway, I wound up uninstalling Avast and installed Avira AntiVirus. I get this with Avira AntiVirus, but unable to remove it.. Looks like a system file as well.

C:\WINNT\$NtUninstallKB959426$\kernel32.dll
[DETECTION] Is the TR/Patched.FM.1 Trojan
[WARNING] The file was ignored!

Here is what Kaspersky shows when I did a online scan.

File name / Threat name / Threats count
C:\WINNT\$NtUninstallKB959426$\kernel32.dll Infected: Trojan.Win32.Patched.fm 1
C:\WINNT\ie7updates\KB963027-IE7\wininet.dll Infected: Trojan.Win32.Patched.fn 1
C:\WINNT\system32\nwklr.ini Infected: Trojan.Win32.Patched.fm 1
C:\WINNT\system32\nwwlnt.ini Infected: Trojan.Win32.Patched.fn 1

I cold not understand why Avast or AntiVira would not take care of this.

Ok, the fix was to just delete those files that Kaspersky was showing..
Now I know if you delete those windows update folders, you can't uninstall those specific updates I believe, which I don't attend to do anyway. I was manually able to delete them. Run scans with several different Anti Virus programs and all is coming up clean now. Now, I did get some malware that SuperAntiSpyware found and cleaned. All was good except for a random windows critical Stop sound.. I was doing nothing.. Ok, the fix for that was, the malware that I had, had a schedule in Task scheduler. Even that it was gone, Task scheduler would try to call it every hour, but it was not there and that is why I got the critical stop sound from windows.. I just deletetd the job and all is good on this pc..
Here is a picture of the Task Sheduler job.

I like to give special thanks to DoorTodoorGeek (Steve McLaughlin from Episode 30 of www.podnutz.com). With out him, I could not have done this.

Dell Dimension 4600c

I have a Dell Dimension 4600c that I'm working on.
The Northbridge heatsink came off. It clips on with two eye clip hooks that I think are solder to the motherboard.
I finally got the motherboard out (4 pictures on top) which is on a tray. I can not figure out how to get the motherboard off of the tray.. It's like it was made not to come off.
Any Ideas?

Update!
I finally got it guys.
What I had to do was put some pressure by pushing the ide connectors. It finally moved and I was able to get it out..
Ok guy's..
I got my soldering tools, including the helping hands. I used the helping hands to hold the uclip so I could get the excess solder off of it so I could get it into the holes on the motherboard. I used the desolder wick and it worked good. The uclip now fits in the holes on the Mb. Now for the soldering part. The pins on the uclip do not come out very far on the bottom of the moterboard, so there is not a lot to work with. I tinned my soldering iron and then very carefully heated the pins from the uclip, then I brought the solder to the pins and just put enough on. Not much radius room before I'd cover some traces, which I didn't want to do. Looks like I got more solder on the uclip then there is on the one that didn't come off. It looked good to me.. So I waited a while and the uclip seemed like it was attached very well to the motherboard.
Now I normally clean the heatsink, but the thermal pad was intact, so I just put it back on. Uclip is holding fine.
Now it took me for ever to get the motherboard out and only like 5 minutes to put the hole thing back together. Now the scary part! I hooked the monitor, keyboard, mouse and PS plug. Turned it on.. Oh no, what is this beeping noise and nothing on the monitor... Oh darn. A steady one beep pause one beep pause..
I forget about Dell's having those lcd diagnostic numbers on the back. I could have looked at it and then figured out what was wrong. I just unplugged everything reseated the ram, plugged it all back in and it's booting fine now.

I like to Thank all my friends from the www.podnutz.com forums. With out their help and support, I would not be posting this.

Two nice programs

I thought I mentioned some of the programs I've been using.
First of all I just signed up for a free file service site. It's called adrive.

Go here www.adrive.com
You get 50 gigs of free space to backup your VIP files to. Pretty nice if you ask me.

Also a real nice Anty Spyware program that I've been using to help clean some of the pc's I work on is called
Pc Tools Spyware Doctor starter kit that you can get from Google Pack.
Just go there and take all the checks out of the other programs( unless you want them)and download it. It is free when you get it from Google Pack.

Thats all for today and happy computing.

Mitch's Pc Repair diary

I've decided why not keep a blog on all the computers I fix.
Kind of a how I did it or a how to. Maybe I can help some one else.
Now I don't fix computers everyday as it's a side job. Sometimes I may fix three in a week, then go weeks with out working on any. So, I won't post every day.

I just got done working on a Toshiba Tecra 8200 laptop. The lcd screen is bad, but works fine with a external monitor. I see I could probably get a used one off of ebay for under $100, but it works fine with the external monitor.
I did put a internal wireless card in the Tecra that I got out of a broken laptop that was given to me. It's working fine with xp. I had to splice one of the antenna wires because it would not reach.
I does now.

Thats all for now.