I'm blogging from my old but reliable Windows XP laptop. For reasons that I do not fully understand, my Windows 7 laptop now powers off with a very loud click from the speakers shortly after I login. It does not do this if I start Windows 7 in Safe Mode, which makes me think there is something viral involved. When I boot from my Windows 7 Recovery Disc, same behavior.
I am running AVG Free Antivirus in Safe Mode to see if it finds anything. I did a restore the last known working restore point, which was March 9, but that did not solve the problem. I am hoping that it is a virus.
UPDATE: A reader suggested looking in the Windows logs. Starting yesterday morning, after a Critical update for Windows 7 was installed (but many hours later), I started getting a complaint about a bad block on the hard disk. But I would not expect such a failure to cause sudden reboots. Nor would I expect it to cause problems in normal mode, but not in safe mode, unless the bad block includes a driver that isn't installed in safe mode.
I ran AVG Free 2014 last night to try and remove any viruses, and I am running Malware Bytes and SpyBot S&D this morning. I am hoping that the combination of the three solves the problem.
Go into the Event Viewer (Win+R, type eventvwr.msc) and look for anything odd. Warning, there's a lot of stuff to wade through. Also try the Reliability History thing, if it exists in Win7 (it's called View Reliability Report in Win8; I'm not sure it was there in Win7.) If you have it it will sometimes tell you things like why, if Windows crashed, the crash happened.
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