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Dead computer. Virus?

S

Sancho

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 15, 2001
Messages
244
Hi,

My folks' computer (which is my old P2-333) died this week. I guess the power went off and it won't power back up. The machine was exhibiting similar behavior almost a month ago, and I swapped out the old PSU (250W) for another old PSU (300W). This seemed to work fine, until this week.

Now, the machine won't power up at all. I'm guessing that it's the old hardware failing, perhaps the CPU or mobo. My dad has been talking to his friends at work though, and one of them mentioned the possibility of a virus doing the damage. Is this possible? For a virus to cripple a system in this way, so that it will no longer power up? Personally, I doubt it, but I guess you never know. If so, how can I go about formatting the machine?

If it's definitly not a virus, what should I look at first in order to determine the cause of this trouble? And yeah, a new computer is definitly in the plans, but we're hoping to squeeze a little more life out of this veteran.

Thanks for any info!
 
i highly doubt its a virus. what OS were you running? something that old is bound to die some day anyway
 
MaMMa said:
i highly doubt its a virus. what OS were you running? something that old is bound to die some day anyway
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Yeah, agreed... it's lasted extremely long anyway :)

It was running WinXP with SP2 or whatnot.

I guess I'll just try my best to boot it up (I've got another P2-300 and mobo lying around, so I'll swap those out) and format it again... but after that I'm leaving it for dead :D

Thanks
 
Could it be the little flat battery that each mobo has? I always thought that it was only there to keep the system time while the computer was shut down.
 
Shattoww said:
A virus can do much more then that, I assure you.
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Impossible. It is physically impossible for a virus to damage a computer and keep it from powering up, unless you can show me a program that can physically alter electrical circuits and/or stop the flow of electricity. When you hit the power switch on your PC, it shorts a simple circuit that sends a signal through the phsyical circuitry to have the power supply kick on. Power supplies don't even respond to normal apps let alone viruses and a virus can't "disable" this feature because it's hardwired into the motherboard.

Now a propery written virus CAN cause a system from starting up by wiping the boot block portion or even the entire bios basically keeping the motherboard in a dead state. Even then, the computer would still turn on.

Sancho, you most likely have one of two main culprits of a system not powering on, bad motherboard or bad CPU. Of course it wouldn't hurt to try a new power supply either. Being that the power dropped and the computer didn't come back on, it was probably damaged by an electrical surge when the power came back on. Before you start the whole "It's plugged into a surge protector" speech, keep this in mind. Surge supressors can only function when the power is on. During a blackout, the supression circuitry is dead (no power = no filter) and when the power kicks back on, the unfiltered current can flow straight into the system.
 
ya i was going to say, theres no way a virus actually does physical damage to hardware.... at least not yet anyway..
 
Foz2001 said:
ya i was going to say, theres no way a virus actually does physical damage to hardware.... at least not yet anyway..
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On the contrary, I believe very old viruses were able to change the hard drive's rotational speed and kill it. Just another obscure fact :p

Edit: Not sure if I made myself clear, but these can't affect you anymore.
 
Talonz said:
On the contrary, I believe very old viruses were able to change the hard drive's rotational speed and kill it. Just another obscure fact :p

Edit: Not sure if I made myself clear, but these can't affect you anymore.
Click to expand...
Ok now you've gone too far... We didn't need to bring in the MFM drives into this! :p Although it was kinda cool to watch the uber geek programmers "race" the drives by making the heads slam against one side of the drive casing and back again.

And yes, this is impossible with any modern (modern being IDE or SCSI or SATA) hard drive.
 
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