The Top Floor Flat

I’ve had a trying last few weeks when it comes to my computer to say the least.

I mentioned in a previous post how during a motherboard replacement operation, the technician removed a giant dust bunny from my computer.  I figured, new internal hardware, dust free insides? I’m good to go.

Unfortunately my problems we just beginning.  Things began to go downhill when I noticed that I was getting a ton of popups, my computer was running slowly and, most unnerving, whenever I did a Google search and clicked on one of the search results, I would be taken to a squeeze page for an affiliate product (in other words, an online advertisement for various products). I was well and truly virus infected and my virus scanners agreed.  I have to believe that some update or upgrade I had made in the past was lost with the new motherboard as I hadn’t changed any browsing habits, and still had the same virus protection as before the operation but now had an effectively worthless computer.  In addition to all that, my main virus software couldn’t even finish a scan to remove the virus as about halfway through I would receive the message:

This system is shutting down. Please save all work in progress and log off. Any unsaved changes will be lost. This shutdown initiated by NT Authority\System.
—————–
Windows must now restart because the DCOM Server Process Launcher Service terminated unexpectedly.

I finally learned that to stop the shutdown, I had to type [or copy and paste ] in to “Run” “shutdown -a” but that only allowed me to run the full virus scan, which informed me I was out of luck when it came to removing the thing, apparently a malware/trojan calling itself Virtum-gen.

Several more restarts and new malware removal tools later, I was getting a clean bill of computer health but had been warned that, as with most malware and Trojans, there was no way to ensure the virus hadn’t left backdoors for other viruses to enter, keyloggers to steal my passwords and financial details, and other nasty stuff.  This was confirmed as, despite the clean virus scan, I was still seeing the wrong page when I clicked on Google search results.

With no other real choice, I took the plunge to reformat my computer, literarlly wipe the entire operating system and all files off my computer and start over.  I was NOT a happy camper as all of my nice, expensive programs for which I no longer have the installation software (Microsoft Office Suite, Adobe Suite, pro virus protection, countless video games… ok, those are probably less important) were gone for good, as well as all my old settings.  Turned out, that was the least of my problems as, without the original installation CDs which are back in London, even with the help of the Dell service reps who walked me through the entire process on the phone, things seemed to have gone badly.

After the reformat, my effectively brand new computer just didn’t want to run properly.  The images were completely distorted (after a few minutes on, and looking at few different windows, it would look as if someone had used a paintbrush to smear everything across the screen).  Then, as if that weren’t enough, the computer would give up entirely, changing to the Blue Screen of Death with the note that the issue was caused by nv4_disp.dll stuck in an infinite loop.

Back on the phone with Dell (who have probably logged over 20 working hours with me amongst all of their employees in the last two and a half weeks) to establish it was a driver problem and install new drivers, old drivers, drivers I’d already installed and had to reinstall.  In the end, one Dell rep decided that all I needed was the new BIOS 14 driver to solve all my problems.

He was about half right.  The computer is… functional.  However I still have the occational distorted graphics, which do tend to disappear after a few moments; and when I type online text boxes (such as forums, blog posts, comment boxes, etc.) the window will hang briefly, during which time the text doesn’t appear when I type and that particular window is frozen.

I’m going to assume this is improved over where I was three weeks ago with a burnt out graphics card on my mother board, but to be honest, I’m pretty sure by this point it would have been cheaper for Dell to just send me a new computer given how much of their employee time has been wasted as they are unable to help me again and again.