Too Many Ports (Chapters 1 and 2)
Chapter 1
The case began in a plain living room, when I walked in and found two tough characters sitting resolutely on their haunches. One was a short wiry guy, balding and hardly up to my chest, running XP Home on 500MHz and 128MB SDRAM. To be honest, I was surprised he hadn’t keeled over from a heart attack yet; there was no way he should still be around with that OS on him. The other was a solid fellow, 1.8GHz and 256 DDR. Granted, he wouldn’t be running anywhere fast with that low amount of RAM, but he looked like he could do some damage.
Neither was exactly a problem for me, though. Not to flatter myself, but I’ve got a good left hook and a sound uppercut, exactly what I gave them: one, two. Baldy managed to install IE7 before he blacked out, but it was the last thing he ever did. And 1.8 was even more complacent, he went down like a dream.
At this point I decided this job would be a cinch; I’d be back in the kitchen with a cold glass of milk within a couple of hours for sure. But for once I had misjudged things. These two still had more kick in them than I thought possible.
Having put both joes into never-never land for at least a good half hour, I started in on the usual routine. Gloves on, tools in hand, I began to comb the place thoroughly for spyware. I remember the good old days when a machine just ran like it was supposed to. But it’s not like that anymore, so I started with 1.8 and went carefully. My task, according to the client, was to get one or the other of them on the internet, and I do my work well.
After a few minutes, I decided 1.8 was definitely my guy, so I turned my attention to Baldy for a bit. There wasn’t much of anything left in him, except the client’s files, all tucked away neatly on the harddrive. As he wasn’t going to be any good now and I knew what I had to do, I worked fast. Within minutes I had him stripped clean, laying there in his drawers on the ground. After slipping his harddrive into 1.8, I threw Baldy over my shoulder and carried him to the alley, where I deposited him unceremoniously in a rubbish heap.
Baldy taken care of, it wouldn’t be long before I finished. Soon 1.8 was looking great and I had moved the client’s files onto the desktop. A few clicks of the LAN cable and he was chugging along happily. That was that and my job was finished. I loaded google.com to make sure and then slipped out the door, wiping the doorknob carefully on the way through.
Chapter 2
As far as I was concerned, that was the end of the story. The client paid up nicely and I was lounging comfortably with a couple extra double sawbucks in my pocket. But just as I was going out to buy a little Christmas something for the cute doll down the street, the phone rang. It was the client and evidently 1.8 was giving her trouble again.
Needless to say, I was over there in a jiffy and nearly knocked the door flat when I entered. I pride myself on finishing the job and my clients know it, so I wasn’t going to let this character make a fool of me. He was sitting there surly-like again, complaining about iTunes, Office, and the internet. Negotiation time was over, so I threw the first jab at the iTunes side of things. That was an easy one, and he let me have it quickly.
Office was obviously going to be a bit more tricky to deal with, but by this time I had 1.8 subdued. He had to talk to me now, though he did so only through a lot of growls and uncivil looks. I interrogated him thoroughly on the subject, but could get only one reply out of him: “Error 25090. Office Setup encountered a problem with the Office Source Engine, system error: -2147023836. Please open SETUP.CHM and look for ‘Office Source Engine’ for information on how to resolve this problem.” It was obvious that I wasn’t going to get anything else out of 1.8, so I left to do a little digging on my own.
My first stop proved effective, as it usually is, because my first stop is always my tried and true informant Google. He pointed me to another guy by the name of Microsoft that might have the information I was looking for. And indeed he did. Turns out 1.8 had gotten his versions mixed up. He had somehow installed his Office twice and gotten it all confused. All that was needed was to uninstall 2003 and install 2000. As this would take a while and I had a get together with a dear old friend for lunch, I left instructions for the client and moved on to the last problem: the internet.
This time I took a clue from 1.8′s run in with Office and updated his network driver to a more recent version, which seemed to do the trick. When I left that day, he was chatting happily with the internet in anticipation of some more Windows Updates. By all appearances the case was solved. Again.
