Windows Inside & Out · Windows Under the Hood · Lesson 5 of 5

Challenge: Dad and the Support Call

A "support agent" wants Dad to paste a command. Help him stay safe.

The call

You stop by your dad's house. He's on the phone, looking worried. A pop-up on his laptop said his computer was infected and showed a number to call. He called it.

The man on the line says he's from "Windows Support." He sounds calm and friendly. He says the virus is spreading fast and Dad must act now.

Now he wants Dad to right-click Start, open Terminal, and paste a command he'll send by text. "It removes the virus," he promises. "Then I'll need your card number for the license."

Dad holds the phone out to you. "He seems to know what he's doing."

A file with two endings

Dad hangs up. Then he remembers: before you arrived, the caller emailed him a file, and he saved it. In Downloads, it shows as WindowsFix.pdf.

You open File Explorer and turn on File name extensions. Now the full name appears: WindowsFix.pdf.exe. Dad hasn't opened it yet. "It's just a PDF," he says. "Isn't it?"

The printer that stopped

While you're there, Dad mentions his printer hasn't worked for a month. Around then, he followed a video called "Make Windows 2x faster" and turned off a list of services.

You open the Services app together. Several services are set to Disabled. One of them is the service that holds print jobs in line and sends them to the printer.

Before you touch the registry

The printer works again. But it still shows a strange error now and then. Dad finds a fix on Microsoft Support that says to change one registry value.

The source is trusted, and the steps are clear. Dad is ready to open Registry Editor and make the change. You remember what you learned about the registry, and ask him to wait one minute.