January 12, 2009 Archives

Spent almost 5 hours looking at PCs this afternoon. Phil's PC more or less turned out to be a 10 minute job. When he'd last cleaned it he hadn't fully reattached the cpu heatsink so it'd get warm and power down. A nice, quick fix. Sarah's laptop however, which I didn't know I was going to look at until I landed, proved to be a pain in the neck. She's doing Graphic Design at Uni and everytime she'd boot up the PC would get to the Vista login screen and reboot. Hitting F8 and loading Last Known Good Configuration would solve the problem until the next reboot. It transpires that a failed update of Adobe CS 3 was probably responsible. After redownloading and attempting to install updates it still wouldn't work correctly. Eventually decided to uninstall CS3 and see if that would help. Again to no avail. Eventually backed up all her college work and other bits and bobs onto an external USB HDD and restored the laptop back to factory default. When I left she was about to start reinstalling software.