perplexing pop-ups

A guy brought his computer to me today complaining of some nasty pop-ups he was getting. He said they came 'out of nowhere' and were not the kind of thing he would want his grand kids to see. I tried to replicate the issue but no pop-ups materialized. So I decided to eat lunch (which I typically do in the shop) and ponder it a bit before starting malware removal. The computer in question was sitting next to me with the desktop up and I was munching my sandwich when the computer screensaver came on. It was a slideshow of family pics of the grand-babies, scenic vacation stuff, pets, naked people, flowers, more naked......heeeeeeeeeeeeeey!!!

Turns out that one of the kids had come to visit and put a folder of pics from his thumb drive into the pictures folder. Thus the unwanted 'pop-ups'! After I stopped choking on my sandwich and laughing at the same time I checked for malware and cleaned up a few trojans and called the man to come and pick up his computer ( After moving the folder out of the pictures folder so they were no longer in the slide show). The man was grateful and said he would be talking to son.....

 

That is a good story :clap

 

LoL! You wouldn't believe the amount of people that tell me, "I'm having trouble with my hard drive.", when they are actually talking about the whole P.C. Apparently its all the same to them. Does make it confusing as to work out what they're on about. rolleyes

 

roflmao What a way for the son to get bustedLOL

 

In a previous life, I worked as an ISP tech, and I had a woman call me who was having trouble with her homepage. It kept coming up as a 404 (Page Cannot Be Found). Well, this was pre-malware, Windows 98 days, and we never had to worry about such things. I went to the most obvious place, and had the woman read the homepage settings off to me, (Netscape Navigator, LOL).

"It says http://www18yearoldhardcore....."

Her voice trailed off.

"Um, ok, lets go ahead and change that homepage for you"

The lady replied with something along the lines of "thats alright, I'll take care of it."

As she hung up, I heard her screaming for her husband. I should have checked the obituaries in Georgia for that week.

Then there were the kids in a huge panic who would call and desparately needed the drop down history box in the browser nuked before the parents got home, LOL. I felt bad for them, I don't recall which browser it was at the time, but either Netscape or IE in those days had no way to delete it aside from regedit, LOL.

 

I have 3 or 4 people that I help on a semi-regular basis (cause they just don't get it) and they always refer to the tower as the "modem". Drivers me insane, and ofcourse, every time I nonchalantly, in a nice manner say, "huh...oh, you mean the tower"...so now I always get..."ya know...the modem...or whatever it's called...you know the box on the floor where you put the cds in" rolleyes