Doomfish, meet Fist of Death

I had a computer job today for a family for whom I’ve worked for several years. I hadn’t been back to see them since the summer, since I’ve been away at college. The symptoms seemed pretty innocuous… a couple of the computers on their wireless network (which I set up for them) couldn’t connect to the Internet, their e-mail address book had gone missing, and a few other bits and bobbles. I arrived and started working on their issues, but something seemed off. The computer was sluggish, icons weren’t where I had put them the last time I was there, and when I clicked on the Firefox icon, Internet Explorer popped up :-/

As I delved deeper, more and more things were weird. Where was the free AVG AntiVirus I’d installed? Indeed, where was Firefox? I asked the lady if she knew anything about the changes. Well, apparently they had called someone else to come out once when their Internet was down and I was away. And this guy was responsible for the trials I was about to face.

It disgusted me how much he took advantage of them. In no short order, he:

  • Removed Firefox, Thunderbird, AVG AntiVirus, and Lavasoft Ad-Aware
  • Installed Internet Explorer 6 (not 7) to replace Firefox
    • AND didn’t bother to patch it using Windows Update
    • AND installed not one, or two, but THREE of those nasty IE search bars
  • Made them buy Microsoft Outlook 2003 from him, which, while not a bad e-mail program, was way overkill for what they needed, and cost $$ vs. Thunderbird’s being free…
  • Installed Norton AntiVirus, the most bloated antivirus solution on the market, since Outlook has zero worm or virus protection (whereas Thunderbird can’t even run those auto-execute worms sent via HTML messages)
  • Installed some weird $19.99 anti-spyware package I had never heard of
  • Installed Windows Desktop Search, Google Desktop Search, and half the other programs in the Google Pack (but strangely enough seemed to miss the fact that Lavasoft Ad-Aware is part of the Google Pack)
  • Destroyed all my custom router settings that allowed them to share a dial-up connection among three computers, which, in the process
    • Wiped out Internet for the two computers not connected to the phone line
    • Auto-connected one of the two other computers to the neighbor’s wireless network (how secure!)
    • Left them with a completely vanilla, unsecured wireless network called NETGEAR with a password of ‘password’
    • Left Windows File Sharing turned on inside this nice unsecured network
    • Turned off the Netgear 108Mbps Extended Range features of the router, even though I specifically bought all Netgear 108 cards so they could use those features
  • Installed another 512MB of RAM in a machine that already had 512MB (Hm, maybe because Norton is a hog? They were only using this computer for Internet and e-mail; it didn’t need a gig of memory.
  • Recommended that they get rid of the computers I just bought for them not even a year ago (eMachines, Athlon 64, with 512MB of RAM and nice DVD burners and flat-screens… I paid less than $400 for each) and replace them with HP computers (this is where I started screaming).
  • Stuck them with a giant labor bill even though he fixed nothing and created dozens of problems!

I was absolutely ticked off. He probably cost them well over $500 in labor costs alone, and they don’t have a lot of money to begin with… that’s why I was always very economical in my software and hardware choices for them. I had to spend over 3 hours fixing all the damage this guy had done, and made sure they knew to NEVER call him again.

I have no clue how this guy can stay in business… but I guess he preys on the ignorant. Don’t let this happen to your friends!

Dewdles by Sam