Someone who works in the same building I do (but not for the same business as I) asked me to look at her son's laptop. She gave me this story about how he was watching a youtube video and IE (yeah I knew, let's all say it simultaneously: EEEEW) locked up on him and now he can't get on the internet at all.

So I'm thinking "eh... okaaaay." I tell her "Sure, I'll take a look at it, see what I can do"

Well, I get home, and I look at the laptop before hooking it up (I knew ahead of time it has a dead battery and requires the AC adapter) and first thing I see, is Windows Vista stickers (everyone simultaneously: DOUBLE EEEW).

Well, I plug the thing in and go "meh this is gonna suck I bet" and I boot it up.

First thing I notice, a completely black desktop with nothing but Recycle Bin showing. Um.... odd.

I open the start menu, it is 100% empty.

.........!?

So I go to the Find box and type "explore" and then I get Windows Explorer that way, and... C: is empty. So I find Control Panel the same way, and show hidden files and folders.

Every Single Thing on the Freaking Computer Is Hidden.

I've NEVER seen anyone do this before. Why would you hide every freaking thing on the computer?

I look through some of his folders, no adult material (seriously, the p-word is censored? Oi) or anything like that, dunno why he'd hide everything on the computer... this just baffles me.

Okay, back to work. I notice a bunch of crap in the systray running and the computer is running quite sluggish so I do a ctrl+alt+del and ask it to run Task Manager. Task Manager pops up for a second or two and then disappears.

...um, okay.

Let's try that again.

BSOD. a stop x8E.

Errrr.

So I boot up in safe mode, go into msconfig... I see no less than 8 fishy programs so I uncheck everything I don't know what it is, and reboot the computer.

Installed Firefox and then AVG Antivirus (just wanted an easy to get free one for now).

Now, the meat of the rant: The first thing the stupid Antivirus wants to scan is a folder called "500,000 games"

And it runs for 30+ minutes and I'm rolling my eyes going "uh, why not check the system folders FIRST!?" noooo it checks the least likely places to actually have viruses instead of trying to clean out the system folders first.

And as I type this, it FINALLY got done with that stupid 500k games folder and... oh wow, 15 trojans/registry keys already... lol.

That's what happens when you don't use an Antivirus.

Hopefully I can clean this all out without doing a Recovery... I'll have to preach to her the value of Antivirus and Mozilla Firefox when I give her computer back.

I'm worried about her HDD though. She had a program called SMART HDD which claims that there are problems with the HDD itself... but yet windows is booting fine other than that STOP error which I think could have been a virus. We'll see what happens once I get done with AVG and Malwarebytes.

Anyways, I'm just bored and rambling on.