Whats caused this?

Ok well a friend of my friend used limewire, and didn't know what an anti-virus was.......soooo yeah. She calls my friend up complaining that every 5 minutes her computer restarts. We both tried to walk her through the steps to save her self and install AVG anti-virus but she couldn't seem to get it done, she got it installed, but couldn't figure out how to get it scanning. I really couldn't help all that much with point and click because I was in the car driving back from Miami.

So today my friend and I are going over to her house to do a repair install save her documents. Or might just bring a Linux Live cd and copy the documents off that way..But anyway I've never hit a virus that does this. I know blaster use to fault something out and you'd get a warning that in 1 minute your computer was restarting, but she starts the computer normally, and she tuns fine but then about 5 minutes later it says its shutting down. I'm just wondering if anyone has run into this before as I'm curious to what it is.

Shutdowns, as in that window pops up, that you can't close, which says "blah blah blah has initiated a shutdown," with a timer that counts down?

If that's the case, then myself and my two sysadmin friends (the three of us made up the entire IT department) had some fun with the -shutdown command in windows this past summer while bored at work. When that annoying box comes up, all one has to do is bring up a command box and type shutdown -a, which aborts the shutdown. And hopefully whatever she has doesn't continually spam it after you do the shutdown abort.

No idea what it could be though. Don't keep up with viruses and haven't had one in too many years.

I had a virus like this years ago. I assume I got it through filesharing as well (Kazaa). It would pop-up a message about comuter restarting in X seconds. It seemed to vary on when it would initiate the restart after getting to the desktop. It was quick enough that I really couldnt get a scan completed or a fix before it would shut down. I eventually backed up important docs to a USB drive and reformatted.

It was the easiest sure fire way to remove it.

Well its a hardware issue.

Went over to take a look and reinstall windows...turned it on, and after windows loaded it froze on us. Then when I hared booted it off...it never turned back on. It gave me one long beep. So thinking it might just be a piece of hardware going bad and I was going to copy the data off with my flash drive, using a boot cd..I cleared the cmos...now only the fans spin and it turns off...I'm thinking PSU. I'll mess more tomorrow.

Turn on and only the fans spin....

Almost sounds like a cpu got a fuzzbunny stuck in it.
(rip cpu :ie overheated)

WarriorII said:

Turn on and only the fans spin....

Almost sounds like a cpu got a fuzzbunny stuck in it.
(rip cpu :ie overheated)

Click to expand...

I had a buddy's computer do that, the darn thing was running at 90c and didnt kill itself, corrupted the Windows install though.

I did see a virus with the dialoge before, you have 60 secs before a restart, there is a Windows update to patch that.