Windows Dell, SBUX

So I get a call from someone around 3PM saying that George, the barber told them I was good with computers, OK. "I was using msconfig and now don't have network access" Geez, that is a shame, yes you can come over and I will look at it, after suggesting that he undo the restore point. So I look at his msconfig, he has undone the restore point and seems pretty good about doing updates, maintenance, hmmm.... what tripped him up? Seems like the Norton Anti-virus ran out a year ago, 4 users on that system, all administrators, I suspect malware, but don't really see a smoking gun. Anyhow I end up typing the service tag into Dell's website and ask for the live assist. Rajiv_123456 comes on line and gets the Device Manager poplulated with devices again by running services.msi and turning Plug and Play to Automatic and starting it. Device Manager is populated again and I am on the net. I was running through a Linux machine and did a tcpdump -w/tmp/t to have the network traffic logged, I suspect that this machine is compromised, or at least I want to be paranoid. I see that there is lots of unnecessary traffic going on, I create a new user and log in as it, traffic is gone. However the Dell guy can't login remotely after trying about 6 times Rajiv says that we should reinstall Windows, and pasts a procedure to do so, something about backing up and then Cntl-F11 to reach a convenient reinstall menu. Oh well, at this point we have burned 6 hours in doing this plus the backup and Edgar leaves afriad his wife will kill him, it is 9PM, I offered to keep the laptop to do this for him, but he wanted to return again, probably won't see the guy again and this will be yet another zombie on the internet. Don't you love windows? Perhaps it is time to snort the t file, see what was going on.

So reading my email another message from Charles saying that I should join yet another mainling list, BarCamp has good stuff on it, but it is 5:26 AM now and I still haven't researched why I need to sell SBUX, ouch Cramer trashed the stock yesterday by reading a buy recommendation, which didn't sound that great and a sell recommendation that he endorsed. I guess I got a tax loss stock here. I have been ignoring my bad stocks for a long time, I hate selling in a really bad down market like November has been. But this one is a dog, can it redeem itself? Probably not, big companies are not able to grow, there is no more space for more Starbucks, who wants it, MacDonalds, DunkinDounuts, etc... cheaper, probably a big attraction now that the dollar is worthless.