Computers are Efficient and Improve Life Quality

I have spent the last two days trying to get John M's net access back. His XP installation had a virus that progressively slowed everything down till it took half an hour to boot, and ten minutes to load Word.

I've tried several times over the last six months to remove the virus, but couldn't. So, yesterday was spent backing up all important documents - a rather slow process, not least because I tried uploading them to my FTP site, emailing them to myself, and emailing them to John's work account, all without success.

Today I simply installed Easy-CD (slowly) and burned them to disc. And formatted the hard drive, installing Windows 2000 - invalidating the warrantee, of course.

Then the problems really began. I have spent ten hours trying to connect through a modem that has absolutely no reason for not working. I now know every aspect of that modem's driver and software configuration - except why the modem gets occasionally recognised, but never connected.

If I did this professionally, I'd either get a commendation for persistance or notice for complete and utter failure.

Tomorrow I want to record my song and take a few hours off from fixing people's bloody computers. I'm usually quite good at it, but this one is cursed.