an_annoying_rant Flowers from Safeway Warning: Those who dislike Flowers_from_Safeway should read no further and file this under blathes_to_avoid My friend Kristen has been asking me to help her with her computer. Her ex-boyfriend screwed it up by downloading tons of crap from kaZaa. He completely filled her hard drive with music and movie files, and subsequently infected it with viruses and/or worms. It is in such poor shape, it won't even run simple programs like cd writer or disk defragmentor. Closing or opening a window takes a minimum of one minute. I have a point, I swear! So I tell her I'll come over tomorrow and have a look. I go to the store for dinner, I get back home and she is waiting there for me with her tower! GRRRRRR! She couldn't wait ONE DAY? Also she has physically removed her hard drive thinking (for some strange reason) that this will help the situation. So I take a look. I am unable to load an anti-virus because there is not enough room. BUT HERE'S THE PART THAT CHEESES ME OFF!!: She will not let me delete anything. Duplicate movie files, porn, music files, more porn, a 4-gigabyte dvd-rip of the friggin' Scorpion King, and did I mention porn? Her reasoning: They are his files. He might want them! This guy cheated on her! In their OWN BED! THEN HE LEFT HER! And she is allowing her computer to continue to suffer continual virus damage because this asshole MIGHT WANT HIS PORNO FILES! I told her I couldn't help her unless she was willing to delete SOMETHING. We debated for an hour and I made it clear that she had to choose which was more important: her pc, or her cheating asshole ex-boyfriend's crap! Disgruntled, she packed up her tower and headed home. Am I in the wrong here? I want to help her, but she is not making it easy for me. I don't know what is going through her mind. Ok, I guess I didn't have much of a point after all. My apologies to anyone bored enough to have read this far. 030627 ... Sparticus not annoying at all safeway. and you are in the right, i would say, but perhaps you need to console your friend more if she is still so attached to her ex. wounds may run deeper than imagined. the fixing of a cpu with his damaged files may be symbolic for her. but what do i know, im just a crestfallen baseball fan from orange county and by the by, i have dozens of puppets! as i kid is used to collect them as stuffed animals. all kinds of animals. instead of a teddy bear growing up, i had "mr. snail," a puppet i still have and cherish for his unflagging companionship. dont get down safeway, you do the world a great service happiness to children a kid who loves puppets 030627 ... Flowers from Safeway You're totally right. I guess I should focus less on my anger toward him, and more on what she is going through. It's just difficult for me to understand, because she doesn't talk to me about that kind of stuff. She is actually a friend of a friend, and hasn't really opened up to me yet. I will try harder to be understanding. Thanks for the insight! 030627 ... endless desire hahaha well obviously you can see that i told him about the puppets. i thought it was pretty freaking awesome. didn't know he would blathe about it though. i laugh. i personally think that if that was a long annoying rant. . .than i don't even know what you qualify some of the things i blathe. aww well. 030627 ... pobodys nerfect Even though I don't know her,it does sound like she might be having problems letting go of the guy. Still,I can't understand why she wouldn't even want to delete multiple files to allow room for the antivirus program,especially with her computer being in the shape it's in. Please tell me she isn't trying to use her computer anyway. That would just be stupid,especially not knowing what virus/worm/trojans might be on there. Some of those trojan programs are damn creepy--alowing the hacker to spy on your every move. *shivers* 030627 ... Flowers from Safeway Yes pobody, I'm afraid she does use it. Although I can't imagine what she uses it for when it can't really do anything right now. I opened her task manager, and it said "cpu usage: 100%" God, how scary is that? 030627 ... minnesota_chris Love makes you stupid, if it's done properly. You can't help her. I want a bunch of sock puppets. I had this idea of making a cable TV show with sock puppets. And today, I just watched my first "Sifl and Olly" show. Rats, they did it first. Maybe I could do it anyways. 030627 ... Mahayana Flowers from safeway, maybe this will help you out Spyware_Malware goodluck 030627 ... endless desire ooh i'll gladly help minnesota_chris get his poet show off the ground. . .as long as one of the poets get be a walrus. 030627 ... eyedream I guarantee you that he made her feel guilty for everything. I guarantee you. wants to go into psychology 030627 ... User24 eyedream, psychology is a lot of fun. I recommend it. it's a bit heavy going, though (at least it was for me 3 years ago) flowers_from_safeway; to be honest, if there's that much crap on the PC, the only viable option is format and re-install, check out webattack.com and sysinternals.com for some useful forensics tools that may help you if you're not allowed to format it. Specifically, I find process explorer and autoruns very useful, also search google for bigfix, install and run it, patch the system and then uninstal it. my personal choice of firewall is zonealarm, very simple and free, and my favorite AV is AVG by grisoft. 030627 ... User24 oh and if you're really serious about monitoring internet activity, check out ethereal, there's a windows port, but it's not very stable, in my experience. 030627 ... Mahayana user24 while your suggestion of ... "if there's that much crap on the PC, the only viable option is format and re-install" ...is sound advice, if flowers_from_safeway can not get their friend to dump the porn, the songs, files, and all the rest of the components on the system, I seriously doubt that they will be able to convience 'em to scrap everything and to start over. Most people unfortunately do not like to scrap and reformat nor do they know how to do-so properly- im not saying this is the case with flowers_from_safeway, and in some cases if its an older computer reformating a hard drive can actually be counter-productive as the formating tools within use are not adequate enough to do a proper format, yes itll reformat however itll take a hit in performance. great suggestion, however.. i think flowers_from_safeway's best bet would have been to convince the friend to let 'em be able to do what they needed to do in order to fix the system, however as they tried, and were not given the opportunity to do so. [plz excuse all of the ambiguous language i do not want to assume sex one way or another] user24 maybe you mentioned. perhaps not. but do you work with technology or computing systems as a professional, if so what field? 030627 ... Flowers from Safeway Hooray for sexual ambiguity! (S)he/I thank you all for the great advice. I never expected so many replies. 030628 ... Flowers from Safeway (puppets rule) 030628 ... User24 Mahayana, I agree, in this case, fixing would probally be better than restarting, and you're right, on old PCs, if you reformat you can never find the right drivers again. I'm a PHP/mySQL scripter, I also do a little javascript and front end website construction, when there's not much on / the site builders are stuck (often happens - this is what happens when Dreamweaver is installed - no-one knows anything anymore; how do you make a website? click the 'make website' button... argh! end rant, sorry) ;0 Dreamweaver is a wysiwymgiyl application. (what-you-see-is-what-you-might-get-if-you're-lucky) 030628 ... User24 restarting = reformatting 030628 ... endless desire yay flowers_from_safeway finally acknowledge our puppet comments! :) i personally was feeling rather tossed aside. . . 030628 ... Flowers from Safeway Sorry bout that. As long as the puppet thing is out in the open, I would like to say how utterly thrilled I am to have just read that the Henson kids just bought The Muppets. Before they stepped in, the highest bidder had been Disney, who would have ruined the company. Nice to know that my favorite characters are back where they belong: in the hands of Hensons. 030628 ... endless desire the two best movies i have ever seen: a muppet christmas carol muppet's treasurer island i don't think you understand. i live for these movies. we watch a muppet christmas carol every christmas and then sixty times throughout the year. ((i might be wrong about its exact name)). my dad has the impersonations from that show. it's terrific. and then there was the television show. my favourite one was where kermit got the green paper and stood by it so you couldn't see him. that was awesome. they also made a cartoon and the muppets when they were babies. they are just great characters. wants to be a muppet too. 030628 ... Flowers from Safeway See the Great Muppet Caper if you haven't already. I love how self-aware it is. They are constantly explaining that they are in a movie and they even watch the opening credits and comment on them. "Does anyone read these names?" "Sure, they all have families." Classic. 030628 ... endless desire oh that's wonderful. i read the credits often because i feel bad for all the people no one reads. it's just kind of sad. my friend dave works for different movie companies to do the credits. he does a lot of fun ones with colours, etc. i figure i mine as well notice them since i know how much work he puts in to them. is determined to see another muppet movie. 030628 ... User24 I read a blathe once where someone was going on and on about reading the titles when the film's finished. It was very amusing. 030629 ... joda Kazaa was also, 'inadvertantly' responsible for the demise of my friend's G-4. Win MX, kids. When will they learn? Although I suppose it deosn't matter, with the news the RIAA has shared in the last week. Here's where I could go on a rant, but tonight, I just don't have the energy. I've been on the boat in the sun all day for crissakes. Even God had ONE day of rest... 030630 ... pray tell what news? 030701 ... joda The RIAA is planning to catch people [*cough* yeah, right...] in the act of stealing music, and take everyoe to court and sue them for what they deem an appropriate fine for stealing copyrighted material. They also informed the world they are really only after the big-time offenders. So if you have more than a thousand files shared on a peer network, they say they will track you and meet you in court. I don't know if this is really possible, or likely, but they threaten it, anyway. 030711 what's it to you? who go blather from