Coworker’s story: Trying to fix a prototype in a hotel room at a European trade show. Soldering iron on hand, but it was a 120V iron and glowed white hot when plugged into a 240V outlet.
So they had one person solder and the other person keep unplugging and replugging the iron from the wall at roughly 25% 50% duty cycle.
I think this might actually be the dumbest. My fear of electricity is one of the main reasons I focus my tech shenanigans on the software side of things rather than the hardware.
I once had to tell a colleague that her breasts were pressing the space bar when she put an invoice in her processed tray. I don’t know about dumb but it was embarrassing.
Friend’s desktop was so fried from Kazaa and Limewire, that he couldn’t even open a Windows explorer window. Ended up opening Notepad and copying all of his files to a thumbdrive using the file open dialog box before reformatting.
IIRC, yes but it’s called differently. I’ve used that technique to work around nannyware a time or two.
This is good to know; does it still work? I’m assuming with the anecdote involving KaZaA and LimeWire we’re talking Windows 2000, ME, or XP.
Removed the plastic film on a brand new phone when someone complained that the earpiece sounded bad during calls
Around 2013-2014ish when the fake FBI viruses when commen, I worked at a tech help desk at my university fixing student computers.
We didn’t have a bootable virus scan avaliable but I discovered it you ctrl-alt-deleted you could tell the system to log out, it would close everything and log out.
but if during a split second when the device was turning on before the virus blocked the screen and actions you opened a word doc or something,
then when you logged out it would close everything (including the virus’s window that was blocking the screen) but the word doc and ask if you wanted to save the document first. By hitting cancel it would stop the logout completely and we could run the various virus scans to get rid of it.
This reminds me of way back when i beat a virus with task manager.
This one was showing as a process in task manager. If you killed it, it would just reappear moments later. I even tried finding the folder it was installing on my pc via rightclick on the program in task manager and clicking “open file location” closing the program and deleting its install folder. But it would still come back, installed somewhere else.
After some time messing around, i noticed that another program would show in the task manager, then the virus would appear, and then the other program would close and disappear from the task manager. All within about 1 or 2 seconds
So i killed the task, waited for the other program to appear right click it fast, open file location, and there it was, a different folder with a program that auto runs when the virus is removed to reinstall the virus and close itself to avoid detection.
I deleted that folder and then killed the virus program in the task manager, and it didn’t reappear. I had won!
I seem to recall it was resistent to virus scanners for this reason.
But this was about 20 years ago so i doubt there are viruses that unsophisticated now.
I had something similar. I was looking at my processes one day for some reason, when I noticed CuteFTP. Now, I knew what it was, but I knew for a fact that I hadn’t installed it. Some investigation led to a hidden folder containing some scripts. One of them was for remote control via an IRC channel. So I hopped in the channel and had a chat with the user who was set to admin the bot on my computer.
Edit: Formatting.
Fucking baller status. There were a couple of fixes, not as complex as yours of course, that I figured out during the wild west of internet and virus infection. Can’t remember any of it in detail, but yeah, shit was it’s own kind of puzzle and was awesome to find a fix like this.
