Tech support detective solved PC crime by looking in the carpark

On Call Some tech support jobs are sweet, and others go sour. Whatever taste they leave in your mouth, The Register celebrates them all each week in On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your support experiences.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Parker" who told us he once had a mostly delicious job in a candy factory.

"A floor manager responsible for production asked me to fix his PC, which was so slow he could literally make a coffee in the time between double-clicking an icon and having the program open," Parker told On Call. The manager's PC was only a year old and ran Windows XP, a combo that at the time of this tale should have made for decent performance.

A quick investigation found many malicious programs installed on the PC, plus an unauthorized local account called "offtime." Parker considered the manager a ...