HijackThis

"Dude, the user at the finance dept. had a problem with his computer"
"Wait, aren't you guys the IT department? Why don't you and go?"
"Dude, are you kidding? It's PC and Linux! We're Mac users, we're IT artists"

However, given the circumstances, this 'IT artist' had to dwell into a Windows-based environment, and had to deal with problems originated from the 'non-IT commoners' about their IT. This, includes can't connect to printer, my Internet Explorer was slow as snail, can't connect to the Wireless, et cetera, et cetera. Most of the time, these problems emerges because simply the 'non-IT commoners' were too darn stupid ignorant to Googling for the solutions and instead ring the bell of a known IT department oblivious to the fact that this 'IT artist' had his hands already full with a) deploying the reporting tools of the Billing application because the vendor's billing application is stupid and can't do more than simply print, we don't want to do that, b) waiting and installing the new hubs and make sure that the network connection remains 'seemingly' online to the end user while doing so, c) migrating the portal application to a new server, while monitoring the progress of the new portal being built, d) creating presentation (with Keynote. Flashy, elegant, and creative-mind-poking-fun alternative rather than that stiff, boring, no-fun-at-all, creative-mind-killer Microsoft PowerPoint) for the next internal IT staff and the Content Management vendor minute-meeting, and e) figuring out what the hell the user with IP of 90 doing with the internet that he's got the whole bandwidth assigned to him flashing red at my monitor.

Anyway, with time, i became more able and fluent in dealing with the user. Lately, when they had problems with the internet connection, the first one i checked on his/her terminal would be the malwares, worked almost every-time.

I encountered the first problem with malware about three weeks ago. A user came to me that she can't open the treasury application which of course, web-based. I was mulling for almost an hour with her terminal (her IE in particular), while propping my MacBook accessing Google everytime. After several tries, i found this tool, HijackThis, and small instructions somewhere in the internet relevant to the problem. With one click, here and there, and her IE works as well as new. I accused her because the problem was clearly caused by the stupid IE toolbar that she's been installing WITHOUT permission, and the stupid IE toolbar won't uninstalled easily, thus, keeping the IE crashed down. I force-remove it the hard way using said HijackThis.

The next problems were easier from there, when a user asked me about his/her IE slowing down, i would immediately look at his/her IE toolbar, and almost everytime pointed it accussingly to him/her and asked him/her unkindly 'Who installed this stupid toolbar?', the look on their faces were priceless. I would ran HijackThis, and voila, for three weeks, several similar cases, i haven't experienced the situation where HijackThis doesn't solved the problem.