computer reboots repeatedly

A friend running WinXP called today and told me that her computer is
rebooting repeatedly at close intervals. She asked if I would come by and
try to fix it. I am not a computer professional, but agreed to try. She
only has one computer in the house, so I won't have access to the net while
attempting to resolve the problem.

The symptom she describe reminded me of reports that I've read of the
latest worm to receive national publicity, W32.Sasser. Am I on the right
track?

I downloaded the tool at http://tinyurl.com/3d3zg and will take it with me
on a floppy, along with a printout of the said page and my Norton CD to
attempt a fix this evening or tomorrow.

Any other possible diagnoses in response to the symptom described (which is
all that the user told me) would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

 

I would also download the fix tool for blaster, because blaster worm does
the same thing.

 

If the problem persists (as it did in the case of a friend of mine) you
can use a tool such as knoppix to retrieve the files, and rebuild.

 

That's a good start. You might want to consider taking along other
antivirus artillery. Stinger (http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/) is
exceptional and small enough to fit on a floppy. If space is not an
issue, bring along your AV program install CD and a copy of the most
recent virus definitions.

If it turns up clean on the virus scan, start looking for hardware
causes. Faulty/improperly connected power supply, overheating, ...
Could be one of any number of things.

Cheers,
dan

 

t.rex wrote in

You may want to download the PQRemove tool for the Sasser worm from
http://www.pandasoftware.com to have with you as well. Just hope that it
is Sasser and not some other virus that disables the Anti-virus and
firewall software- I fixed one a couple of weeks ago that was that way
and try as I might could not get any other Anti-virus to load. The darn
thing was sending out one virus infected e-mail after another. The user
had bought Norton but then never thought of renewing thus the definitions
were sorely out of date. But I digress...

Sultan

 

I suggest you read this page http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/sasser.asp and download the detection tool. I would use all microsoft's recommendations to insure it's removed and then *also* patched. Don't forget to stop her PC shutting down in Start>Run by typing: shutdown -a

 

The first thing I would do would be go into the BIOS Setup and set them back
to default. Sounds like someone has been tweaking the BIOS and did
something wrong.