PC repair

My daughter's PC broke sometime in the last few days. And she broke down, too.

Something was amiss with her computer and it would take 5 minutes for IE to load a web page. So, I tried with Mozilla, same thing. Figuring that there was something with the networking hardware, I swapped out the wired NIC for a wireless one. No dice. If it wasn't a hardware problem, it was a software problem.

I checked for spyware (had to download the installs on another PC and do the sneaker network thing) and surprisingly, her computer was clean. No viruses, either. I even shut off the firewall (both Windows and McAfee), with no luck. I then took the other route and turned the firewall to the almost tightest setting, where it would ask before it let any connection in or out. Still no luck.

For grins, I tried to FTP to another one of the PCs on our home network and it worked, and blazingly fast, too. Hmm, the mystery deepens.

Finally, I just shutdown all of the Windows services. Some of them, I needed to turn back on so that networking and other things would work, but I got http transfers to work! So, then I started turning things back on.

And wouldn't you know it, it was the something from the McAfee secuirty suite. I uninstalled it entirely and her computer still worked!

Since it's a free download from Comcast for customers, I installed the freshest version and what do you know? It still works!

My mad computer skillz aren't gone and now my daughter is happy again (and there is less fighting about who is using whose computer).