The joys of woes ...

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My name is Joel Burt and I work on the Windows Home Server team supporting the community and setting up hardware for events. I’m also a car and driving enthusiast. I thought I would share a story from this past weekend …

I had a fantastic weekend! Went out for a cruise with 350 other drivers, raised some money for a charity while enjoying a nice sunny day. It was basically 10 hours of driving enjoyment looking at beautiful cars on a beautiful day. As resting as it was, it takes a lot out of you. The last thing I wanted to deal with when I got home was a computer support phone call from my dad.

My dad is stubborn and bullheaded when it comes to certain things. I have been unable to convince him he needs to have a Windows Home Server in his home. He has 2 computers, high speed internet and two kids (15 and 12) still living at home, Xbox in the living room, his wife (my mom) takes all sorts of digital pictures and stores them on their computer. It’s basically the perfect setup for Windows Home Server. He just couldn’t see how or why he would need it.

I thought I could solve his newly introduced spyware problem because I had just fixed this exact same issue on my friend’s computer. My dad lives in Michigan so you can imagine how telling him how to download and install anti-spyware programs while dealing with pop-up ads, can be a bit frustrating on both ends. After about 30 minutes on the phone, I moved to having him port forward his router for Remote Desktop and enabling it on his computer. I then proceeded to remove this infection through Remote Desktop. Doing so outside of Safe Mode really is futile, but hey, it’s my dad and I had to try. End result, I am doing another hour or two tonight on the phone helping him reload his computer with Windows Media Center Edition 2005.

Before I informed him of reloading his computer, I told him that if he had accepted the Windows Home Server I wanted to give him, we would have been done a long time ago and he would have been up and running exactly how he was before he accidently clicked that virus-infected link. I love you dad, a box running Windows Home Server is in the mail.

JB