alligatoring
Posts: 7 +0
I have a Toshiba Satellite P100 laptop and have had it for about 4 years now, I've had some viruses in the past and windows XP did corrupt on me about a year ago (I thought my Hard Drive was toast) but it was completely fine until last night.
It began freezing - that is one program would lock up, then everything would freeze, quick enough that I could never Ctrl + Alt + Delete, so I had to power it off to restart. Sometimes it'll freeze and then just power itself off. This is infrequent though, usually I have to manually power it off.
- The last program I installed was on Feb 6, 2010
- I recently installed new RAM (1x 2GBs Kingston PC2), but nothing has acted up until now.
- I was reading an e-book on Adobe Reader 9, on the internet looking up lyrics (FireFox) and on AIM chatting.
- I have Malwarebytes, Spybot Search & Destroy and Avast! installed, the only thing odd was that Avast! keep flashing something about Google Analytics which I thought was weird but I (naively) didn't think too much of it (I just figured it was blocking an ad).
So I turned it back on and loaded just the e-book (pdf) I was reading, and AIM and it froze again within 5-10 minutes of logging on. So I had to power it off and turn it back on, then I only loaded AIM and it still froze. This is where I got concerned, so I booted into safemode and ran malwarebytes, the full scan found 16 infected files but it errored and I couldn't remove them, so I restarted again into Safe Mode w/ networking this time to update Malwarebytes, did the same thing it only came up with three infected files.
It was a bit concerning that most of the 16 files it listed were in the system32 folder and were .sys or .dll like cdrom.sys and modem.sys
Through some googling (on another computer) I found that malware and such can hide in system restore and subsequently purged the restore points (none of them worked anyways), I installed Hijack This and deleted the two blank BHOs which another site suggested I get rid of. The other things I tried were: disabling everything in the startup via msconfig, I also took out my battery pack and am running solely on the adapter (as I considered overheating as well) - now my computer will run about 30-40 minutes and then freezes. It's not enough time to get through any full scan so I have no idea if I have a virus/malware/trojan still or not. Those blank entries keep repopping up, infrequently, so I really have no idea what's causing it but I'm lead to believe a virus... but then again I'm completely stumped, my computer has never been knocked on its butt like this.
Does this sound like a virus/malware etc problem or is my computer on it's death bed? (hardware failing).
I wouldn't have a problem with just formatting to see if that would cure it, I have most of my data backed up already but there are some fairly important PSD files I need (dumb not to back them up regularly I know) and I don't want to risk getting the virus (if it is one) onto my external hard drive as well.
Tomorrow I'm going to try blowing the vents with compressed air, though I don't think it's actually an overheating issue as my core temps stay in the 50s and when it gets up to 55 they turn on and the temps drop back down to the low fifties.
I don't know what else to try, as I can't rule out a virus until I can get through a complete scan without it freezing. Any suggestions / help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
It began freezing - that is one program would lock up, then everything would freeze, quick enough that I could never Ctrl + Alt + Delete, so I had to power it off to restart. Sometimes it'll freeze and then just power itself off. This is infrequent though, usually I have to manually power it off.
- The last program I installed was on Feb 6, 2010
- I recently installed new RAM (1x 2GBs Kingston PC2), but nothing has acted up until now.
- I was reading an e-book on Adobe Reader 9, on the internet looking up lyrics (FireFox) and on AIM chatting.
- I have Malwarebytes, Spybot Search & Destroy and Avast! installed, the only thing odd was that Avast! keep flashing something about Google Analytics which I thought was weird but I (naively) didn't think too much of it (I just figured it was blocking an ad).
So I turned it back on and loaded just the e-book (pdf) I was reading, and AIM and it froze again within 5-10 minutes of logging on. So I had to power it off and turn it back on, then I only loaded AIM and it still froze. This is where I got concerned, so I booted into safemode and ran malwarebytes, the full scan found 16 infected files but it errored and I couldn't remove them, so I restarted again into Safe Mode w/ networking this time to update Malwarebytes, did the same thing it only came up with three infected files.
It was a bit concerning that most of the 16 files it listed were in the system32 folder and were .sys or .dll like cdrom.sys and modem.sys
Through some googling (on another computer) I found that malware and such can hide in system restore and subsequently purged the restore points (none of them worked anyways), I installed Hijack This and deleted the two blank BHOs which another site suggested I get rid of. The other things I tried were: disabling everything in the startup via msconfig, I also took out my battery pack and am running solely on the adapter (as I considered overheating as well) - now my computer will run about 30-40 minutes and then freezes. It's not enough time to get through any full scan so I have no idea if I have a virus/malware/trojan still or not. Those blank entries keep repopping up, infrequently, so I really have no idea what's causing it but I'm lead to believe a virus... but then again I'm completely stumped, my computer has never been knocked on its butt like this.
Does this sound like a virus/malware etc problem or is my computer on it's death bed? (hardware failing).
I wouldn't have a problem with just formatting to see if that would cure it, I have most of my data backed up already but there are some fairly important PSD files I need (dumb not to back them up regularly I know) and I don't want to risk getting the virus (if it is one) onto my external hard drive as well.
Tomorrow I'm going to try blowing the vents with compressed air, though I don't think it's actually an overheating issue as my core temps stay in the 50s and when it gets up to 55 they turn on and the temps drop back down to the low fifties.
I don't know what else to try, as I can't rule out a virus until I can get through a complete scan without it freezing. Any suggestions / help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!