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My sister's laptop has been sitting on a shelf for a couple of months, waiting for me to get around to sorting out its problems. It's a somewhat elderly Sony Vaio that had picked up some very nasty Spyware type things that didn't seem to want to go away.
After a bit of fiddling, I came to the conclusion that a full reinstall might be in order. Unfortunately, this isn't possible because the CD drive ain't working, and so far efforts to get into the case to see if it can be repaired/replaced have been fruitless.
So back to plan A. I installed latest Antivirus and Antispyware from a USB drive and did a full scan, which seemed to remove some problems. The only problem is that most of these programs don't arrive in a very up to date state, and seem to depend on being able to update themselves from the internet. So after some more struggles I managed to get a WiFi card working in it. Adaware ran and immediately found 163 "critical problems". I asked it to remove them and rebooted, and suddenly things seemed a lot more normal and happy.
It's currently installing a service pack, and it will soon be returned with instructions for keeping it up-to-date, as I'm not sure what we'll do if anything terminal should happen to the current OS.
After a bit of fiddling, I came to the conclusion that a full reinstall might be in order. Unfortunately, this isn't possible because the CD drive ain't working, and so far efforts to get into the case to see if it can be repaired/replaced have been fruitless.
So back to plan A. I installed latest Antivirus and Antispyware from a USB drive and did a full scan, which seemed to remove some problems. The only problem is that most of these programs don't arrive in a very up to date state, and seem to depend on being able to update themselves from the internet. So after some more struggles I managed to get a WiFi card working in it. Adaware ran and immediately found 163 "critical problems". I asked it to remove them and rebooted, and suddenly things seemed a lot more normal and happy.
It's currently installing a service pack, and it will soon be returned with instructions for keeping it up-to-date, as I'm not sure what we'll do if anything terminal should happen to the current OS.
