Tech Support II

For the second time in a week I had to play tech support. Our internet browsing capabilities, probably due to another virus (thanks Facebook or maybe the children) pretty much crashed yesterday because our DNS was having issues. I found the problem at about 10:30 last night after a late-night, desperate, romantic trip to the grocery tsore with my wife, though apparently she had been frustrated by it for a few hours before that. At first, I just thought I'd probably have to throw my hands up and then spend a good part of today working on it, but then I realized that my wife couldn't access her e-mail, which is pretty important to her business. That motivated me to poke around a little.

I was up until four. I'm very tired and feel vaguely sick today, but it works now. It wasn't fun: after downloading (which was hard because only about one in five websites would actually load for me) and running about a billion different scanners, each finding a few different little things, most of which were nothing to be alarmed about, and then learning a bunch of little commands to type into the command prompt and fooling with all of that, it was still broken. At four, I was running yet another scan, decided to let it do its thing, and went to bed. My wife got up to see that the scan went cleanly, but the internet didn't work much. I had left her a note advising her to just turn the computer off in that event, which she did. When I turned it back on, it worked, albeit very s-l-o-w-l-y at first. The reboot must have done the trick after whatever problems got worked out, I suppose.

I kind of have two things to say about this, so far as relating to the content of this blog goes. First, I'm glad I have the capacity to help out in this way. It turned out that I would have only been inconvenienced by the problem (unless it worsened), but her whole e-thing would have been crippled, this on the heels of her massive website-based issue that took two unnecessary weeks to sort out but eventually got sorted. Second, I don't understand why people make and distribute that kind of software onto computers, particularly through social networking sites in rather insidious ways. Behind good men are good people, and good people just don't do that kind of thing -- instead they try to go out of their way to make things better for others, not more difficult or irritating. Oh well... what can we do?