Fork in the Path of Ministry

God said I had the choice, but I’d be a fool for saying “no.”

Warning to regular readers: There will be an increase in the number of posts regarding computer ministry issues. The reason is I sense a shift in calling to be ready for more calls from people who need my help. Already I have gained the confidence of at least one client who didn’t like the way MS tech support did things. I suppose it’s because I always make it a point to explain what I’m doing and how it works, insofar as I can get them to understand. And I really do go to great lengths to find ways to explain how computers work in layman’s terms. It’s all about the people, not the computers, for me.

Naturally, I’ll be posting a lot about Windows because that’s what most people use. I think I’ll add a new feature of anecdotes on the work I’m doing.

For example, I just discovered that Vista by default does not limit the cache on Internet Explorer. Client bought it six years ago and wondered why his hard drive was so full, when the files he knew about didn’t take up more than 5% of the drive space. When he had a problem with some malware, I came to help and as part of the process decided to run an intensive virus scanner (boots and runs from CD). I had already tried MS’s Windows Defender Offline boot CD (I keep a copy of both 32-bit and 64-bit with me), and it found the Trojan, but not the payload. The client is pretty savvy, being in the technology field professionally, but not a computer geek. He was game to experiment because I admitted I’m not a real technician, just a power user somewhere down the road in front of him. So we left the scanner running … and running.

It’s now been over 48 hours, and it has been chugging away at his IE cache for all but two of those hours. Over 5 million files in his cache and still scanning. Chances are the malware is somewhere in that cache; it’s where I usually find the one affecting his computer. Later today we are cutting it off and I’m going to run one of the many LiveCD distros of Linux on his computer. I’ll mount his hard drive and delete the cache, which Vista hides:

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\systemprofile\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\

(Edit: In some cases there are even more intervening folders, such as AppData\Local, etc.)

There are subfolders in there with random-sequence names. Together they take up some 90% of his hard drive. Then I’ll copy over a different kind of scanner which can run from the Rescue Console of Windows, if necessary (Vipre Resuce). It scans with a different set of heuristics, and should find stuff the other scanner might have missed. With the cache emptied, it shouldn’t taken nearly as long.

If this sort of thing entertains or informs you, look for a new title tag: CM (for computer ministry). The nickname I gave my computer ministry is CentOK-CM = Central Oklahoma Computer Ministry. Computer tech support ministry is not the sort of thing that shows up in books too well; it’s obsolete in a matter of months most of the time.