Thirty Minutes Before the Batch: A Lab Full of Symptoms
Sunita runs a small ITeS training centre in a two-room building with 12 desktop computers running Windows 10 (4 GB RAM, 500 GB hard disk). A batch of 20 students arrives for a practical class in 30 minutes, and the centre has no internet connection.
Computer PC-04 takes about six minutes to reach the desktop and then freezes whenever a browser is opened. Its C: drive shows only 2 GB free. A student reports that his pen drive, used on PC-04 yesterday, now shows folders but no files inside them. Another machine, PC-07, displays files named "assignment" and "photo" with no extension at all, and a student has just double-clicked one of them. On PC-09 the printer icon reads "Offline – 1 document in queue", although the printer is switched on, connected by cable and loaded with paper.
1. In what order should Sunita deal with PC-04 in the 30 minutes available? Justify the order and state what she should check at each step.
Read the worked answer
Get the other 11 machines running first and quarantine PC-04; never reformat a machine 30 minutes before a class.
- Free disk space - biggest and safest win. Only 2 GB free on a 500 GB drive is the classic cause of six-minute boots: Windows cannot build the page file or stage updates. Run Disk Cleanup including system files, empty the Recycle Bin, delete old downloads and temp files, uninstall unused software, and move student files to another drive. Target 10–15 GB free.
- Check what starts automatically. Ctrl+Shift+Esc → Task Manager → Startup tab; disable heavy updaters and toolbars. This is reversible.
- Check memory pressure. Performance tab: if RAM sits near 100% with one browser open, 4 GB is the real limit. Plan a RAM/SSD upgrade, but that is a decision for later, not a pre-class fix.
- Full malware scan after the batch - the pen-drive symptom on the same machine points to infection.
- Only then suspect hardware: chkdsk, drive health/SMART, Event Viewer disk errors, then a repair install or last-known-good.
Reinstalling the operating system is last because it takes longer than the class and destroys the evidence needed to fix the other machines.
2. The pen drive shows folders but no files. Explain the most likely cause and give a recovery sequence that does not destroy evidence. Also explain how to show extensions on PC-07 and why it matters.
Read the worked answer
Cause: folders visible but empty is the classic shortcut virus. It sets the real files to Hidden + System and drops .lnk shortcuts that look like folders. Double-clicking a shortcut runs the malware again.
Recovery sequence
- Do not format the drive first, and do not double-click any shortcut.
- On a clean machine open File Explorer → View → tick "Hidden items" and "File name extensions"; untick "Hide protected operating system files".
- Scan the pen drive with updated antivirus and remove the shortcut files.
- Copy the real data off the drive to the hard disk before doing anything else.
- From Command Prompt on the drive, run
attrib -h -s -r /s /dso the files lose the hidden/system attributes and reappear. - Only after the data is safe, format the pen drive - and scan PC-04 too, since it wrote the infection.
PC-07: File Explorer → View → File name extensions. A file named photo.jpg.exe is an executable; with extensions hidden, Windows shows it as photo.jpg and the student clicks it. Showing extensions also exposes .pdf.exe and .docx.scr double-extension tricks, so it is a permanent safety setting, not a one-off fix.
3. PC-09 reports the printer as offline with one document in the queue. List the checks Sunita should make, in the cheapest-first order, and explain when she should conclude it is a hardware fault.
Read the worked answer
"Offline – 1 document in queue" is a software state, not proof of a broken printer, and a stuck job blocks every later job.
- Physical link: check the USB or LAN cable is firmly seated at both ends, the printer is powered, has paper and shows no error light.
- Clear the queue: Settings → Printers → open the queue → cancel the stuck document.
- The offline toggle: Printer → untick "Use Printer Offline". This single checkbox is the most common cause of the message.
- Default printer: confirm the correct device is default - Windows may be sending jobs to "Microsoft Print to PDF" or a removed printer.
- Restart the Print Spooler: services.msc → Print Spooler → Restart; this clears a corrupted queue.
- Power-cycle the printer, then print a Windows test page.
When it is hardware: if the printer's own self-test page prints from its panel but the Windows test page fails over both cable and another port, treat it as a port/cable or printer fault. If neither page prints, the fault is inside the printer - call service, do not keep re-installing drivers, which fixes nothing and wastes class time.