Hi All,
I am running on impulse power at the moment (laptop) as the warp drive (Dell Tower) has died.
This happened a couple of hours after someone claiming to be from Microsoft rang and told my wife that they had detected we had a virus on the computer and offered to clean it up. He was sent away wit a flea in his ear (Told in no uncertain terms that he was a scammer). I am now wondering whether the computer in question already had a Key logger and some kind of remote control software installed on it and the death of the system is "revenge" for not signing up to their offer to "clean up the system". It seems a big co-incidence that it died so soon after their being told to go away.
To details........
Dell tower with XP SP3 and Norton 360 which has been on for good few years and replaced some form of NAV that has been on te 'puter since day one (approx 5 years). It has been coming up regularly with messages saying it's fixed this threat, and it's fixed that threat, but asummed that's just it doing it's job.
After my wife had sent the foreign (telephone number) man away, (computer was on at this time we think) she worked on other stuff (not computing) for a couple of hours, then went to the computer to check email. she was reading a PDF sent by our daughter's school when the computer froze. She restarted and got nothing but a blank screen and a fast running fan. It does light up the DVD drive LED a few times. An attempt to power the machine off just results in it trying to boot again.
I had a (brief) look at it last night and discovered the following.........
- The screen is OK (works on the laptop)
- Removing RAM results in the machine beeping (Suggests the BIOS and processor are funtioning??)
- Putting just 2 of the 4 RAM sticks (DIMMS??) into 2 of the four slots (either the black or the white) stops the beeping, but the computer still just sits there with a blank screen and lights up the DVD drive). I haven't yet ad time to try all the sticks in all the slots.
I did wonder about trying to boot from the Dell recovery CD, but if i'm not getting even the Dell splash screen from the BIOS or any kind of hit F whatever to enter the BIOS type message, then I probably wouldn't get very far.
It may be that the HDD isn't spinning, (or perhaps it's doing it quietly (I was sat under the desk trying to do this).
Other thought was that the 'puter is actualy booting fine, and it's the built in VGA that's borked.
Then I thought, could it be that some kind of virus (or something else) had corrupted the BIOS either deliberately or accidentally) If so, it this fixable without having a working BIOS with which to boot to run the BIOS flashing program (If I have one??)???
I had a quick Google, but the articles I found on BIOS viruses all asummed that the computer was still able to boot into Windows
Any thoughts / helpgratefully recieved.
(Though suggestions to switch to linux at the grand old age of 49
99/100ths probably won't be followed up)TIA
Chris