Diagnostics - An YOCC Customer Needs Met with a Six Year Old 128 MB Windows XP, 75MB Hard Drive Machine - Good Work Habits, Conservative Use

******No Need to Use Fancy Technology if Needs are not Fancy**************

Please contact me at denny@yourcomputerconsultant.com if you'd like YOCC to take a look at your machine via remote session.

Here's a fairly non-common, impressive diagnostic report.

Hi X –

Thanks for taking the time with me this morning to do some preliminary diagnostics on your XP, Windows, 128MB RAM, 75MB hard drive machine.

Here’s a summary of what we did and some initial thoughts on what we saw.

1. Overall, I’d rate your machine and the way you interact with it as between a B+ and an A -. Considering the machine if 6 plus years old, you appear to have developed good working habits with it, and have kept it in pretty good shape. So, unless you want to (because you want to do something like becoming a photo/video guy or become a gamer or something), I would not recommend a new machine for any particular good reason.

2. Compared to some machines I’ve checked out, yours appears to be relatively clean and virus free. The AOL Financial errors we saw could be a result of a bug in the AOL software or maybe there is some malware associated with the way you are interacting with AOL.com, but nothing jumps out at me as being particularly problematic.

3. Please continue to leave your machine on as you do already so any Windows updates or anti-virus updates can occur at times when you are not using your machine.

4. If you start getting a lot of errors when you access AOL Financial, try shutting down your machine as you normally do and re-starting it. If the errors persist immediately post a “re-boot” (shutdown, re-start), maybe we could/should have another look. Let me know how it goes, when you can.

5. Even with GotoAssist.com running (the program we used to connect me to your machine), your memory, physical cpu space and so on did not seem to be particularly challenged – that’s a good thing. We got what I consider to be reasonable response from your machine during our entire session.

6. The ONLY possible red flag I spotted is that I could not determine with certainty that you have anti-virus software up and running and up to date on your machine. Where you do your mail and financials via AOL and do not appear to do a lot of internet browsing – e.g. via Internet Explorer or Firefox – it may have minimized your exposure to malware, viruses, phishers and other evilness.

7. Nonetheless you may consider upgrading your system to do have adequate internet security capability – but kindly note that many internet security programs have sometimes been reported to impact computer performance (that is, throughput) negatively. That is, you may install Norton and/or McAfee or another AV program and find that your system slows down – I mentions this particularly, where you have the 128MB RAM capacity.

8. If you decide to install AV software, Comcast offers a free version via your cable provider account. I’d be happy to step you through that if you decide you want to try it.

9. Other than that, I’d have to say your machine is in pretty good shape.

10. As we discussed, I’d be happy to do any training with you choose to undertake.

11. If you have any sensitive data on your machine, you may consider some sort of external backup scheme – e.g. CD, flash drive, offsite backup (e.g. Carbonite) and so on. But only if you have data that would be difficult to replace if your system takes a terminal crash of some kind.

12. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll do some internet browsing to check out the following error you are seeing:

An error has occurred in the script on this page (AOL Financial)
Line 1513
Char 214
Unterminated string constants
Code 0
http://www.dailyfinance.com
Do you want to continue running scripts on this page?
y/n

Otherwise, keep on doing what you are doing.

I hope found our session to be useful from your perspective.

It was a pleasure working with you and checking out your machine.

Best regards,
Denny Baylor
YourOwnComputerConsultant
781.330.9782 (mobile)