Last night I had dinner at a friend's house. Just as I was about to leave to go someplace else, his wife casually mentioned she's having problems with her PC. I decided to do a spot check (without fixing anything due to time constraints). Imagine what I discovered: 1. No Firewall running (they can't use it at all due to videoconferencing) 2. Ad-Aware and Spybot detected 544 spywares running wild 3. Drivers for CDROM and DVD-R drives corrupted or missing. 4. She doesn't even have XP CD or HP Recovery CD. If you were me, what'd you do first? Any thought will be appreciated btw She doesm't understand the diff between viurus and parasites. Just because she subscribes to AOL-McAfee Online virusscan she thinks her PC is virus-free!

Almost forgot to summarize another problem - 5) Mouse right-click disabled - no context menu!

If it were a machine I were given for free, I would probably purchase XP to solve the issues (I would use Linux for a free HP, but you get my point). If they do not want to spend the money, call HP. Have them send or sell them the recovery cd. Back up all documents to floppy (or a usb flash drive, which are cheap now). Run the recovery program back to factory defaults. Remove the HP crapware. Install the HP crapware. This assumes the recovery partition on the harddrive has not been damaged. When all is well, download the free version of zone alarm or sygate. You should be able to configure it to work with video conferencing. Just cause they could not does not mean it can't be done.

That's embarressing: I meant to replace remove with uninstall and it came out as "install the hp crapware." Also: if you have a copy of XP, you might be able to use it to repair your friends, but back up the documents first.