The Nut Behind the Wheel.

You may remember that during the recent COP20 Summit my PC starting suffering from very serious problems. At the half-way point in the summit these problems became terminal so I switched to a different machine and sent the original one off for repair. That repair was completed on Saturday (20/12/14).

I think it is fair to assume that the computer problems I suffer from go above and beyond what a normal high street retailer is used to dealing with. As a result the repair report I received simply declared that the machine was working again. However the suspicion has always been that the machine anti-virus software has been hijacked to install a toolkit virus allowing a third party to control it remotely for example to prevent it from logging onto the Internet by corrupting the DNS registry. Another trick has been to blast the PC with requests for data causing the Central Processing Unit (CPU) to overload in a type of Denial of Service (DoS) attack only on a single machine rather then a network. This obviously does put physical stress on the CPU increasing the chances it will fail.

Yesterday (22/12/14) my father decided to plug in the repaired machine to establish if it was working. It appears that the repair shop simply took the nuclear option of wiping the hard-disc clean and then re-installing all the system files such as the operating system. When you boot up initially from this type of repair it takes ages. For example we had to install pretty much every update ever created for Windows Vista. This process was made all the more torturous by the fact my less computer literate father decided he was going to take charge. As a result I was prevented from using any PC for most of yesterday afternoon and evening although I wasn't in a particular rush to do so.

Within a few minutes of getting onto the repaired machine this morning I was able to tell that it hadn't been repaired at all. Despite the rather shoddy system wipe the CPU rapidly overloaded crashing the machine. As a result I think the CPU is simply knackered and needs to be replaced. Mind you my father is the sort of person who if using a PC got an on-screen message saying; "A hacker wishes to install a virus to steal all your money and kill all your family" he would still find impossible to click the "Deny" button.

On the subject of computer problems China has declared that it would be irresponsible to accuse it of being behind yesterday's Internet outage in the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK). However one suspects not as irresponsible as the US trying to claim responsibility from what was far from a sophisticated attack.

12:10 on 23/12/14 (UK date).