A very strange thing happened today and I’d be interested to hear anyone’s views on this. I apologise that the information I can give about it is pretty sketchy.
My elderly neighbour has been given a laptop which is running Vista Business user OS. (She had no choice.) She has no computer skills whatsoever so I have been assisting her. The person who sold the laptop and who set up her internet contact via a ZyXEL modem has disappeared and she does not know the password for the modem’s security.
I allowed the laptop to download and install a few MS security updates and it rebooted itself during this process. When it loaded, it could not connect and I got an error which basically said that the passwords did not match. After unsuccessfully trying to find out why it would not connect I went into the control panel and viewed the list of updates. The latest date shown was 15/11/10 so I, wrongly, assumed that that was today’s date and proceeded to uninstall the updates I had just installed (I thought). I uninstalled one, number 98…… which I though must be the last one installed then uninstalled another and the laptop asked to be rebooted which I did.
When it rebooted, it connected automatically. I have temporarily told the laptop not to download and install updates automatically, but was I lucky and found the one update that caused this or is there another explanation? I know I can reinstall them one by one and see if the same thing happens, but it’s such a slow machine! My next task is to see what is loading at start up and see if I can speed it up for her.
