Well, over 12 hours later, I'm still working my way through some of these. Can't complain though, it's all billable!
Totally disrupted my plans for the day though.
Had a number of panic fixes this morning, which included a couple of retail stores with about 15 POS PC terminals that suddenly decided to stop working in front of queues of customers! Annoyingly, these systems are all running XP Embedded POSReady 2009 too, which is supposed to have extended MS support until 2019!
And funnily enough ....
Im currently sitting at a dental office trying to troubleshoot why all of their computers are just straight broke
.... a dental practice is what I'm presently sorting out. They only have about 5 XP machines remaining (which were due to be replaced very soon), but this one is a bit of a pain because the dental software they use has a history of not playing too nicely with most AV software. Getting it to work reliably in the past involved much trial and error and the addition of a number of AV/Firewall exclusions. I've replaced most other MSE installations with Bitdefender today, but for this one Avira seems to be the most suitable, hopefully ...
This morning, for many of the crippled systems, I simply uninsulated MSE just to minimise the down-time and the impact on my day's appointments. Once I got back, I began installing the alternative AV software on them all.
One thing that I must say was very useful this morning was ScreenConnect. I've only recently switched to using this software and the command line feature came in very handy! I was able to uninstall MSE without disturbing staff by simply pasting the following command into each unattended session connection:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Security Client\Setup.exe" /x /s
(silently UN-installs MSE without having to start a remote session).
