Cheap at twice the price

Well, I was performing the usual ‘tech geek’ duty this afternoon. I was fixing up a friend’s computer. It was a real mess. It had originally been split into 4 FAT partitions (that’s not FAT32), with a lot of wasted space on the disk. Using partition magic, I upgraded them to two partitions – one for the Windows 98, and the other for Windows 2000. Then I fixed the modem so it would work in Windows 2000 – it needed a driver download from the Gateway web site. Once that was completed I installed Zone Alarm (personal edition). That fixed an immediate problem – there was a computer somewhere on the Eircom network that was just barraging the machine with SMB packets – virus or hacker I don’t know, but it was causing 100% processor utilization and was killing the machine while it was connected to the internet. Mairt was of the impression that the fan was internet noise. That confirms my opinion – firewall first, the rest is just ornamentation.
What was my charge for all this work? An Indian meal, complete with a bottle of beer! I really am cheap tech support.
Internet noise… what next?