I’ve been working on a friend’s computer (Windows XP) that kept shutting down one minute after it booted because some DCOM service “terminated improperly”. The machine was in pretty bad shape, so I was just going to reinstall Windows, but needed to get their files backed up. Anyway, one minute isn’t long enough to back up files to a memory card or anything, so I booted the machine with Knoppix on a CD and burned off the files to CDs. Knoppix (bootable Linux CD) can be a handy rescue tool. This Gateway machine, like most big-brand computers, had a special restore partition that you can boot from to reinstall the OS, etc. So, it slowly comes back to life. I assume it will later be infected again by Internet Explorer and fake spyware warnings that trick them into installing real spyware. Maybe I should just leave it running Knoppix.