In the last few days Avast has caught 3 or 4 viruses but my outlook started acting really weird today and was placing new mails directly into the deleted items folder in spite of the fact that there were no rules set up to do this (verified). So i ran avast virus scan, 4 times in the last 3 hours and every time the whole computer powers down in the middle! Is this a virus’ intention, one that slipped thru avast’s sensors? Is this an avast incompatibility? Is anyone else having similar issues this week?
please help!! I even tried to restore my Win XP system to a week ago and it still powered down the computer…
Hi and welcome,
When you say “powers down” ,do you mean a crash as in a BSOD or blue screen of death as its called. or logging you off ? or maybe just instant reboot?
no freeze, no blue screen, literally, turns off, shuts down, night night… the only other thing today that happened computer wise was that i installed firefox 1.5 but i have since uninstalled it and still have the problem…
is it possible for you to download hyjack this http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3155.html and generate a log with it , paste the log here and maybe someone here can spot something bad.
Also you could try an online scan here http://www.kaspersky.com/remoteviruschk.html and see if it crashes your system as well. Remember to de-activate Avast while it is in progress.
If you do get a BSOD crash it would be really helpful if you could have your system generate a minidump file.
see attached pic to set your system to do this, I am assuming you have windows xp.If and when you can get this minidump file send it to vlk@avast.com with a brief explanation and he will be able to investigate whats crashing your system.
It is like igor says. Not a lot of people know that dust inside a comp can be a worse enemy than a virus even. Your are well advised to open up your computer and clean the dust out every year, turn your keyboard over and pat the dust out. I lost a motherboard through dust, dust can kill computers!!!
gents, thanks for all your help. i am going to try all that you say but here is some new and interesting info perhaps: When i right click and select scan of every folder in the C drive it does not have the same issue, i was able to scan everything one by one (hidden files too) with no issues?!?!
by the way, how do i de-dustify a laptop? toshiba satellite a75…?
the above online scan can only handles 1mb at a time and I have NO CLUE which sectors to begin with since i don’t know where avast was when the system crashed/shut down - the c drive has 45G on it so selecting 1mb pieces is not practical…
There should (could) have a possibility of disabling automatic restart (the just reboots again behavior).
By disabling the automatically restart on system failure feature, you are able to read what messages appear on the blue screen and can, if necessary, pass the information on to your technical support person or post here.
It’s important the error numbers and the error message there.
Disable Automatic Restart:
System Properties > Advanced > [Startup and Recovery]Settings
Remove the checkmark from “Automatically Restart” in the System Failure section.
Anyway, you should check Windows Events and avast! logs to see if anything strange is happening.
Re your HJT log contents, there a couple of entries marked Nasty, however, I believe they are legit as they refers to Toshiba.com search and I presume that was set that way when you got the system.
There are a number of unknown or unnecessary entries one of which should be fixed in HJT:
O9 - Extra button: (no name) - {CD67F990-D8E9-11d2-98FE-00C0F0318AFE} - (no file)
Lastly this one which Should possible be causing conflict depending on what elements of Symantec Security Centre you still have installed?
If you have tried to uninstall all Symantec products you should also fix this in HJT.
O23 - Service: SymWMI Service (SymWSC) - Unknown owner - C:\Program Files\Common Files\Symantec Shared\Security Center\SymWSC.exe (file missing)