14 DAY TRIAL // A few days ago, I got a complaint from a friend that had trouble with his computer. He said it just kept rebooting. That was bizarre - I know that most rebooting problems come from CPU fans not working properly, but his PC was brand new. So I went and checked it out. I turned on the machine, it booted from Windows XP and nothing bad happened. I downloaded a program to "stress" the CPU and another one to show me what temperature it was running at. Nothing fishy though, it was all OK. I couldn't quite figure out what was going on. Then, I wanted to take a look in his Windows folder, but before clicking on "My Computer" it rebooted. Now that was weird.
Before anything else could happen, I decided to run it in Safe mode with Networking. I got a blue screen at some time, and boy, when you hit a blue screen with XP, you can tell that you really have problems with your machine. I rebooted it again and started it in the same way. That's when I noticed it had no AV protection. I managed (luckily enough) to install the trial version of NOD32 on the cursed thing. And guess what? It started prompting that this machine is severely infected - before I could even choose to delete the virus, I got another blue screen. Boy, that PC was a mess. I formatted it and got rid of the viruses that way, since he didn't have much data on it anyway. Worked like a charm afterwards?
Now, initially I would have never thought that his machine was infected like that, and let this be a lesson to all of you. If you do not have AV protection, a lot of nasty stuff can happen to your PC. So, before you start blaming the problem on a hardware component (like I did) do a virus search first. Malware can do lots of bad things, that's why deploying security measures is important!