Chernobyl.  My girlfriend's parents got hit with it.  

In fact, their whole family got hit with it, about 10 different computers in
all.  Everyone went out and bought new ones at Best Buy.  I just got a board
and a Duron for her parent's, and they ended up paying only about $200 for a
new and faster board/chip.  

Chernobyl wipes the bios.  No way to fix it except to send it in to the
manufacturer.  I made sure I got them a board with a read-only jumper for
the bios so that won't happen again.  And Norton AV 2002, which requires no
user interaction to get it's virus updates.  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nate Carlson [mailto:natecars at real-time.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2001 10:33 AM
> To: Twin Cities Linux User Group
> Subject: [TCLUG] [OT] Virus kills computers?
> 
> 
> One of my friend's families has two computers, an old Gateway 
> Pentium 75, and a P2-333 I built for them (Tyan MB, good 
> quality components.)
> 
> She was checking her e-mail (Hotmail) the other day, expecing 
> an attachment from a friend of hers. Well, there was an 
> e-mail from that friend, and she tried to open it on the 
> P2-333, but the message "just came up blank" (which makes me 
> expect Badtrans, as that's how it generally appears). So, she 
> tried it on the P75, same thing.
> 
> The next day, she said that the P2-333 locked up, and she 
> went to reboot it. When she rebooted it, it just started 
> beeping (it's the POST beep.. didn't write down the sequence 
> of beeps yet.). She called me, and I told her something 
> probably went bad. Funny thing is, two days later, the P75 
> started developing problems with it's printer, and then all 
> of the sudden, it locked up, when she tried to reboot it, it 
> did the exact same thing as the P2-333.
> 
> My best guess on this is that the virus that was in that 
> message contained some code to erase the CMOS or something 
> along those lines. I heard someone mention that one of the 
> viruses going around can do this in unusual cases, but didn't 
> really pay much attention to it. Anyone know more than I do 
> about this?
> 
> I suppose it's possible that there was a major power surge 
> that sent both of them spiraling down, but they are both 
> behind good quality surge protectors, etc, so it'd have to be 
> a pretty big spike.. I haven't taken the computers home and 
> ripped them apart to figure out what the exact problem is 
> yet, but when I do that might give a little more info.
> 
> Needless to say, I set them up with a new P3-733, and they 
> aren't going to be using it on the 'net until it's got a 
> virus scanner set to update daily automatically.  :)  I wish 
> I could convert them to Linux, but, not that family yet.. heh!
> 
> -- 
> Nate Carlson <natecars at real-time.com>   | Phone : (952)943-8700
> http://www.real-time.com                | Fax   : (952)943-8500
> 
> 
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