There’s an interesting article up at ITWorld.com called Even the Builders of Windows Find Tech Support a Challenge.
In it, we hear how Jim Allchin recounted a story about Steve Ballmer, who while attending a wedding was asked if he could take a look at someone’s PC which was performing extremely slowly. To his credit, Ballmer was happy to oblige his friend.
From the article:
According to Allchin, Ballmer spent the better part of the next two days trying to rid this PC of worms, viruses, spyware, malware, severe fragmentation, and well, you name it. Picture it: the world’s 24th wealthiest person, a man worth $13.6 billion according to Forbes magazine, sitting at a table for two days, playing tech support. It was, Allchin says, a humbling experience.
Allchin says Ballmer eventually gave up and instead lugged the machine back to Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash. campus. There, several engineers spent several days, burrowing deep into the system to figure out the problem. Imagine, CSI: Redmond.
It turns out there were more than a hundred pieces of malware of various types. Things that these engineers using Microsoft’s own private tools could not ferret out and fix. Some of these threats hooked themselves deeply into the core operating system and essentially lied about their existence. Other malware scoured the hard drive for anything containing the string “virus,” and, in Allchin’s words, would “shoot them dead.” The result was disabling any installed antivirus software.
It took a team of engineers to restore this system to health.
This, to me, is fascinating. Anyone who has every tried to deal with a really bad spyware/adware/other infection can probably empathize with the aforementioned engineers — in fact most people I know, myself included, would have given up, backed up the data, and reinstalled Windows rather than spending several days on one PC. But if anyone is able to “burrow in” to Windows and fix these issues, I suppose a team of Microsoft engineers ought to be — after all, it’s their OS.
The article goes on to state that this experience caused Microsoft to “get religion” about system health — though the article’s author remains skeptical, as do probably most of the rest of us. At any rate, I thought it was a cool story. Ballmer usually comes across as very easy to dislike, and I thought that, if nothing else, this showed another side of him. Can’t say I blame him for taking the machine back to Redmond after two days, either… ;-)
Oh, it seemed to be working, and all. The trouble was, the boot process got to be taking about forty minutes. I, in my razor sharp technical analysis, concluded that something was wrong.