Thread: Heres a tricky one for you

Here's the reply I promised with the rest of the history. Firstly reinstalling Windows on the Vista machine is not an option due to the fact that there is no copy of Vista available.

The problems with the XP machine began in May 2009. After I received a call from Cheryl, who complained about trouble with Ted's machine, I came over to take a look. Cheryl had told me that she was trying to install Trend AV then got to the registration page and for some reason cancelled the installation. When I got there I saw something I had never seen before. There was no desktop just the background pic. No start button no icons or any way to take control of the PC. I formatted the harddrive and reinstalled Windows XP. Everything seemed to work fine, except Windows refused to recognize the onboard soundcard even though the drivers were installed. When I reinstalled Webroot after reinstallation of XP There were trojan warnings in spite of the format and reinstallation of the OS. After doing everything I knew of to get the drivers recognized the ? unrecognized result still persisted and webroots warnings got so bad the PC was virtually unusable -their copy of Webroot is licensed and straight out of the box. I subsequently reformatted and reinstalled XP 4 times and in the process exceeded my license for XP. The best I was able to do was getting the volume and mixer controls to become available but no sound and the device still unrecognized by XP. Because the machine at this point had been overhauled twice by the manufacturer, I decided to go into the BIOS to check for hardware damage. I noted that most of the BIOS options -including the sound configuration- blocked the user from making changes, there was no way around this problem. After identifying the type of motherboard's manufacturer -Phoenix- I looked the board up on the web. The information I received said that the sound device in the BIOS needed to be changed from auto to enabled. As I stated earlier, the option to change this was unavailable even though the info on the BIOS screen was visible I couldn't move the selector over it. Well after banging my head -not literally- on Ted's computer for 3 days, I managed to get the Malware warnings to stop showing up on Webroot. Because Cheryl had used up her license for Trend AV I installed AVG free on Ted's computer and notified him that Webroot would be redundant and a waste of memory. Once again in spite of the fact that he comes crying to me everytime he screws up his PC he didn't listen and to this day he still has more AV and trojan software running than his memory seems to be able to handle. He constantly complains about his speed yet refuses to listen. He's a real primitive Pete when it comes to PCs. I repeatedly told Cheryl not to let him on her computer but she didn't listen now her computer, as well as his, is doing the reboot crap. She even catches him going on the sites that I warned them about, yet neither of them listen. So here we are.

Thanks scorps, but believe it or not I've done all that you said several times. As far as the XP machine goes, I think Ted got into some malware that goes beyond even a format or Ted is screwing up his PC so fast after repair that it seems that way. Except for the sound issue I get it running with decent speed, then he calls me later complaining again. I think he is a PC abuser lol. When it comes to Cheryl's PC the Vista system. I usually get it back up to speed and she doesn't have problems for quite a while, in fact the problems usually don't reoccur until Ted has been using it. I think the problem is definitely him but I've never in all my experience fixing PCs, seen anyone screw them up as much as he does. If I was charging for support Ted would be a goldmine, lol.