A Virus Methinks

[Valentine]

I have a PC with Win XP installed & have a problem whereby it keeps rebooting for no apparent reason. Sometime it happens after the desktop appears or before. Some indications that it is about to reboot are a black square on the right side of the taskbar, the cursor gets elongated, everything just frezzes. Sometime it wont reboot & I hit the reset button or turn off the power. I am currently running in safe mode.

I have previously AVG Free & now currently Avira free along with Spybot & am religious about scanning downloaded files before I open them. I have run a full scan with Avira which identified 3 low level viruses & repaired them. I have also run a full scan with Spybot a couple of weeks ago which also detected & repaired some problems. It also seems to be getting worse & any advice will be helpful.

I basically have all my data backed up apart from some recent files but I am also concerned there may be problems in the back up data which will come back to haunt me if I reformat & install XP then reload my data.

[monty]

How long does your PC run when in safe mode?

To me it looks more like either a ram problem or a power supply/overheating problem.

The funny graphical effects indicate maybe your graphics card going on the blink...

[Valentine]

How long does your PC run when in safe mode?

To me it looks more like either a ram problem or a power supply/overheating problem.

The funny graphical effects indicate maybe your graphics card going on the blink...

It can run for quite a while in safe mode. It is an old computer but my daughter has a similar problem on her PC which is only 2 years old. This morning I ran a programme called VRIPRE & went out. It was running in DOS mode & when I came back the computer had shut down. When I booted up it all seemed pretty normal so I will wait & see.

Many years ago on another computer I had a virus which none of the regular anti virus software could find or do anything about it. I took it to a shop & they ended up running a Thai anti virus programme which fixed it.

[RKASA]

More like they did a reset of the BIOS to default settings and cured the overclock. BIOS can get corrupted and yours is the most common way it acts. Shops will often sell you coolers and ram chips then reset it. Get my drift. My desk top does it with its asus mobo (never have another one) about three times a year.

Remove the power and the battery, set the jumper to reset BIOS mine take 10 min. in this state to be sure it worked. put the jumper back, the battery back, power up, set date time and boot order in BOIS. That makes mine run just fine again for months. Might want to replace that battery if its a few years old too, they are pretty cheap.

But that does not mean a problem has not happened, just that you should research this for your mobo and try it first. This is not the same as re flashing the BIOS, only do that to upgrade the BIOS if one exists because if it restarts during a re flash you got big problems.

[cdnvic]

How long does your PC run when in safe mode?

To me it looks more like either a ram problem or a power supply/overheating problem.

The funny graphical effects indicate maybe your graphics card going on the blink...

I had this once. Graphics card was over-stressing the under powered power supply due to a fan seizing and it was causing reboots.

Try removing your peripherals, and as much ram as you can. See if it persists. If not, it's a matter of adding things back on until the problem starts again.

[phazey]

It's your RAM. Try and download UBCD (google it) and run the stress tests after you've burnt it and booted from the resulting CD.

Good luck.

[astral]

I had this problem a few weeks back with a new machine running Vista.

It happened after a Windows update, and was a conflict with the free version of ZoneAlarm.