The Greatest Virus of Them All!

I let the kids at the La Ola Orphanage use my Acer laptop. They love its speed (dual-core, two gigs of RAM, Windows 8) because it is so much faster than the old Windows XP computers they have. But about ten days ago, everything started going wrong with my laptop. I installed all kinds of antimalware programs, worked diligently at correcting problems, and finally got it back online, although slower than it had ever been.

I carefully worked around problems and today I got it running pretty well. But I couldn't figure out what they had done to cause these many problems. Suddenly, light dawned, and I checked...

THEY HAD INSTALLED WINDOWS 8.1!

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finlux

Hi Vince53

And there lies a true tale!

Smiley LOL

Vince53

Okay, after months of telling people that WINDOWS 8.1 IS NOT AN UPGRADE. IT IS A COMPLETE OPERATING SYSTEM, AND WHEN YOU INSTALL IT, YOU ERASE ALL YOUR DRIVERS, and explaining that you should never change the operating system on a laptop, the kids at the orphanage installed Windows 8.1 without my knowledge ten days ago.

Here's what I did to correct the multitude of problems. Not realizing what had happened, but beset with problems:

1) I ran a deep scan with Windows Defender, Malwarebytes, and SuperAntiSpyware. They uncovered several minor problems that had not interfered with Windows 8, but had been troubling 8.1.

2) I already had my laptop set to install Windows updates and Windows drivers automatically. As the days went by, the problems lessened, and I think it was taking my laptop a while to replace the generic drivers that came with 8.1. If I had known what was wrong, I would have LET THE LAPTOP SIT THERE, CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET, SO IT HAS TIME TO UPDATE ITS DRIVERS.

3) I installed the free Driver Booster program from IObit.com. On my desktop, it found nine outdated driver that Microsoft missed. After carefully setting a System Restore Point, I installed them with no problems. However, it found nothing on my laptop.

I have to manually reconnect to the orphanage wireless system every time I turn it on, and it runs a little slower than it used to. However, it has gotten faster over the last few days, and I think it is finding better drivers. On my home DSL, it runs fine.

kkanne20

That's hilarious, although not altogether very surprising...

Vince53

I thought I'd give an update. After the little darlings at La Ola Orphanage installed Windows 8.1 on my laptop without my knowledge, I improved things by running deep scans with various malware programs, and I let Windows and another program automatically do updates.