A friend has an older Dell laptop with Windows XP that won't connect
wirelessly to internet. Maybe other problems, don't know. He knows
nothing at all about computers, so he asked me for advice since I know
next to nothing. He believes his problem is caused by viruses since he
sees a message that his laptop has 178 viruses. Don't know where the
message comes from, maybe an expired virus program from Dell or maybe a
virus program that he paid to download from the web. He doesn't know
what he downloaded, if anything, and he threw away all the CDs that came
from Dell, including OS, since he didn't know what they were for.
I told him to go to a local computer builder (not chain repair place)
who might have an old Win XP OS on hand, tell them that he will pay to
have the disk wiped and the OS reinstalled (ask price first), and say
that if the computer won't work afterwards he will make no demand that
the computer be fixed for that initial price. The computer is old
enough that a high price to fix isn't wise, and he has no data that
needs to be saved.
Should I have told him something else?
(I could try to fix for him but I am not that dumb.)
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