Close, But No Cigar

Friday night, I got call from one of my PC clients with a problem with his his machine. Without any warning (when is there ever a warning), his PC lost all audio. The usual checks (speaker cables, volume/mute controls, etc.) produced no easy fix. Next, I used Copilot to remote into his PC for a quick look around. Sure enough, when I looked at the “Sounds and Audio Devices” control Panel, things didn’t look right. The RealTek HD audio device was present in the device manager, but in this Audio Devices control panel, everything was disabled, and I couldn’t even choose a default device for playback. Clearly, there was some kind of driver issue.

There was a second issue going on, and that was Internet Explorer kept acting funny and generating generic host process errors (Svchost.exe). I’d seen this error before, and my research pointed the finger to some errant hotfix delivered via XP’s Automatic Update feature. Don’t you just love it when you’re trying to do right by staying updated, and it causes a problem? Wouldn’t be the first time, won’t be the last.

I also noticed the client had let his anti-virus package expire, which left his machine vulnerable to say the least. So I decided that I wanted to get a closer look at the machine, and the client agreed to drive it over to my place the next morning. In the back of my mind, I thought worst case scenario and was preparing myself (and the client) to have to re-image the machine.

So Saturday morning rolled around, and he showed up with his HP Pavilion m7250n Media Center PC. Ironically, it’s the same exact model of my main PC. I started to poke around on it, and decided to give myself 2-3 hours to see if I couldn’t debug the errors before making the decision to backup his data and re-image. And lo and behold, I seemed to be making progress.

Once I found the Microsoft “hotfix” that was released to fix another hotfix, things started to fall into place. Almost to my chagrin, the hotfix seemed to do the trick. The svchost.exe errors went away whenever I launched Internet Exploder, I mean Explorer. I then went to Microsoft Update, and manually applied all the critical patches and updates that hadn’t been applied yet. Was I tempting fate? Perhaps, but everything went smoothly.

Next up was the audio issue. HP’s knowledgebase advised me to go directly to Realtek’s Web site for updated drivers for the specific audio adapter this PC. In this case, it was the High Definition Audio Codecs that matched the audio adapter in this HP machine.

So after downloading and installing those drivers, presto, I had sound back. My early notion of needing to rebuild was looking less and less necessary. But I still wasn’t out of the woods. With his anti-virus subscription having expired in November 2006, I wanted to be sure there weren’t any nasties lurking on his hard drive. I installed a fresh copy of Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0, updated it, then did a deep scan. All it found was a couple tracking cookies. The last thing I did was defrag his drive, which was really quite fragmented. That took a long while to complete, but it was worth it because the machine seemed noticeably speedier afterwards.

I called the client to give him the good news - most notably that I didn’t have to re-image his PC (I felt somewhat embarrassed to have thought that was a possibility in the first place, but you never know). I also told him that I would hand deliver his PC to his house on Sunday, as my errands that day would take me within a few miles of his home. How’s that for the personal touch? Oh, and actually I did get a cigar from his personal stash as a token of thanks.

[tags]cigar, anti-virus, Kaspersky, Copilot, re-image, defrag, hotfix[/tags]