It's Monday morning and I've been up since 6h30 and awake since five. Talk about a totally fucked up sleeping schedule! Last night my dad called me and woke me up... at 18h15. I had pulled an all nighter and finally went to bed around eleven planning to get back up around two and head over there to take a look at his computer problems.
I did go there and fixed the issues, but a tad bit later than planned. It was well past 7PM when I finally looked at the troubled machine, but by 11:30 it had undergone an upgrade to XP Professional SP2 (a legit copy!), had been fulled patches and checked and freed of spyware (there was little to be found, phew); had flash updated, Opera uninstalled, as well as some other programs no longer used.
The second machine I had nearby - actually one roll of the chair away - was given a new install of Java and all older versions got removed. Ancient flash installs got their head chopped off too and some minor tweaks were done.
All things considered a rather productive afternoon/evening and one less machine open to (easy) abuse by hackers, virus and malware authors or spammers.
Oh, I finally found an easy way to update Apple Quicktime to the secure 7.1.3.191 version - even a new install from the Apple website still hands out the insecure 7.1.3.100 version, boo Apple! - and I'll be providing the instructions here (assuming QT is installed in the default directory) :
1. open Windows Explorer
2. navigate to C:\Program Files\QuickTime and check the version of QuickTimePlayer.exe
3. if it is 7.1.3.191, all is well, lower versions are insecure and/or out of date
4. if it has a lower version number, navigate to C:\Program Files\Apple Software Update and run SoftwareUpdate.exe
5. Download and install the update to Apple Software Update
6. Download and install the Security Update 2007-001
7. Verify the version number of QuickTimePlayer.exe and see if it's 7.1.3.191
8. Done!