Sir Binbag Arises Part One

Out of the Darkness

A good few months ago R was picking her way through some rubbish tips and returned home with the base unit of a Dell Dimension 2350. I didn't know it was a 2350 and I hadn't named it as Binbag at that time.

There was some life in it but not much - it took a zillion years to boot and seemed unable to sustain its graphical interface for long. I was able to tell quite quickly that

1) It was running XP Home
2)Had multiple users
3)Had all those multiple users data
4)Was badly damaged in some way - either software or hardware or both.

After a few of these painful boots I thought that I would try and boot into a live Linux environment so I could root around the files. I inclined more to thinking it was malware related. Even when I couldn't open the CD Drive I thought it was malware (the previous owners were a family with a lot of teenage children - possibly a foster family). The bios was such that it couldn't boot from a USB drive either so I shelved the project hoping to salvage a few spare parts maybe when I had time.

I popped into Maplins and purchased their summer catalogue which inspired me to have another go at fixing Binbag. At the very least I could use the box and PSU and so on and build a new system up from there, motherboard and all.

I managed to boot into a reasonably usable Safe Mode after a few attempts as Administrator and ran dir/s/b in the command interface (cmd.exe). This listed every file on the C:\ Drive -there was a lot of music files in there. I was able to see that the C:\ drive was absolutely packed to the rim and maybe this was what was causing the problems. You're supposed to leave 20% free. After contemplating copying all this music I soon decided just to delete most of it all- there wasn't one artist I had heard off. I used cmd.exe again several times using del /s/b *.mp3 and del /s/b *.aac and all the other audio extensions I could think off. This deleted all the mp3s, aacs and so on. Cmd.exe is a very blunt but very powerful instrument.

It gave me a slight improvement in performance which allowed me to attach a flashdrive with HijackThis and Spybot. I was not knowledgeable enough to benefit from the HijackThis log but I could see problem areas. However Spybot performed admirably flagging up and fixing a whole bunch of scary looking Trojans. A much bigger improvement followed so I set about this anti-malware routine. I also went through Add/Remove Programs looking for anything that might have carried the malware (or be the malware). I cleansed the Temple.

One thing I grew to hate and one thing I liked - Macfee Security Suite (or don't know its proper name) I hated. It 's so vast and so all-consuming. It seemed hellbent on preventing me fixing the thing, for example sending me misleading messages when I used msconfig to remove unwanted startup programs. I wiped it out and installed Sunbelt Personal Firewall and AntiVir Anti-virus. Life got better.

Progress had been made. I will post my further struggles in due course including Microsoft licensing hell and its consequences.

windows+seven dell xp recycling linux dimension+2350 licensing coa