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 > > > _______________________________________________ > Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. > Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.mn-> linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >