Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Not My Day For Stuff Technological

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.

1 comment:

  1. 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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