No wonder, my computer at work was acting quirky this morning.

 

Thanks, I think. I'm not nearly as demanding with students as I am with myself and my expectations are much lower. Not to toot my own horn, but I'm currently the most popular prof in the dept. for some odd reason. And I doubt there are many, if any, students who view me as being a hard-nose.

Now back to the demonic possession of DrC's computer...

 

... which exhibited the following symptoms:

- overnight reboot, it was awaiting its hardware password this morning. The fan sounded odd.

- HW PW produced first WinXP startup screen, then black for a long time, followed by a short Blue Screen of Death pronouncing a core dump.

- Hard off-on (two of 'em) got past the HW PW but no farther.

This, combined with the odd fan noise, suggests to me that the fan died, it overheated and rebooted, then got pretty cooled down waiting for the HW PW; but then it quickly got heated up again. I'll see if I can get dust out of the fan and so on and try rebooting it with it sitting on a cooling pad (one of those with its own fans).

We'll see ...

HPH

 

Poor baby! The 14th is coming, just give it time.

 

Must be something to this Friday the 13th business. I've got a workstation here that's infected with some sort of Trojan which so far seems to be unknown and is dropping viruses one of which, L6Y7trig.exe, is also unknown.

On the upside it doesn't seem to be network aware and the antivirus software is quarantining the viruses as they are spawned.

I'll be spending the better part of the afternoon throwing a gauntlet of anti-malware stuff at it and will probably end up having to reinstall XP.

Wheee!

 

I had the same problem with one our laptops yesterday. I've come to love the young man who regularly visits us from A+ Computer Geeks. $75/hr for a house call and he was able to get all the data off the hard drive with this widget on his keyring before having to reformat it. What he wasn't able to do was save the programs that had been installed beyond the Windows XP standard edition he reformatted it with but that was no biggie. While he was here, I had him take 3 dead computers that were stashed in the closet and retrieve all the data from them, loading it onto this laptop that I use currently. It was a lot of data that I'll have to go through, probably most of which can be deleted, but I wasn't sure what was on there and some stuff I did really want to have. At least one of those computers hadn't worked in over 4 years but had a lot of pictures on it I wanted, so I never tossed it.

Of course, all of that took a few hours and it was the second time I've had him out this month so I'm thinking of adopting him and taking him as a dependent on our taxes.

 

Been surfing those, um, racy web sites again, Mike? Everyone knows that's where you pick up weird viruses.

I had one of those once (except, of course, I got it from a different sort of place, a bowling blog, as I recall...), and it replicated itself randomly, driving me crazy. Eventually, the services came out with a fix for it (both an anti-virus scan update and a special removal program).

Now, I stay far, far away from those bowling blogs. HPH

 

I hate Trojan viruses as they usually require you to modify lines in your registry to get rid of them correctly.

 

Both of my workstations are clean but then again about the only website I vist at work is s2ki.com.

That is until today. I've tried everything from Ad-aware to SpyBot and there's still some process running in the background that's accessing the hard drive even in Safe Mode. It gets real busy when I connect it to the Internet.

It's all good though. Monday morning I'll nuke it and do a reinstall.

 

Nuking and reinstall always works.