My next door neighbor Daniel is the maintenance guy for the school district and a master electrician but like a lot of folks, not good with computer maintenance. He asked me if I could clean up his very sluggish Windows 10 laptop, so I did. I got rid of a ton of crap and deep cleaned the Avast antivirus from his registry so Windows Defender could work again and protect his machine. The computer was also locked in that Windows Update/Repair loop so I killed the Service. Then I installed some tools and a secure version of Firefox, and the box is purring like a kitten.

Yesterday he asked me if I could take a look at his son Drew's computer, a six year old HP laptop running 8.1 and loaded up with all the crap a twenty year old normally acquires. I asked Drew if he was willing to give it all up and restore his OS to it's original state from the recovery partition and he said absolutely. I left that process running all night, upgraded the box with all of the 8.1 updates this morning, extracted his product key from the registry, then installed Windows 10 right on top of it. Again, new OS, purring like a kitten.

They just dropped by to pick up the box and they were very happy campers. Daniel keeps saying he want's to pay me and I keep declining. You never know when you're going to need a handyman. :-) When he said My wife's laptop has some issues... I shouted "What am I, your computer repair bitch?". You should have seen the look on his face until I told him I was kidding. The truth is, I take great satisfaction out of using my experience and knowledge to bring an old computer back to life. Wife's computer, next...