[thirning]

MOVED TO MALWARE FORUM - SORRY!

Hi there! I have a laptop running Windows 98 as our extra computer for the family room area. My husband was surfing the net last night and was infected with trojan-spy.html.smitfraud.c. It had the black box with the "WARNING" message and all that superimposed over our desktop. I came online and found a great resource page here and went through the steps suggested, ran virus scan (had to do the Trend Micro one because I could not install AVG for some reason, nothing found though), downloaded lots of utilities the post said to, etc. I went to run Hijack This again to post the log file for further help. When I tried to open the log file, the computer froze. I tried to ctl alt del to close out whatever was not responding, nothing worked. I turned the computer off by doing another ctl alt del and now it will not even come back on, nothing.

HELP!! Did I kill it??

Thanks so much.

Terri

Edited by thirning, 16 June 2005 - 12:17 PM.

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Try booting with the 98 CD in

[Retired Tech]

Try booting with the 98 CD in

[thirning]

The CD drive won't open and I can't find our copy of Windows 98! Is there any other way to even get it to turn on? It won't even power up at all.

Thanks,
Terri

[Retired Tech]

Can you confirm the PC does not light up, beep or show you the BIOS manufacturer screen

Edited by Keith, 17 June 2005 - 11:58 AM.

[thirning]

That is correct. The power light comes on for a couple of seconds but then shuts off. There is no sound of the computer booting up and nothing at all appears on the screen. It is plugged in right now so there is no battery issue. It just froze, died and has not come back up since.

[gerryf]

terri,

Try this: remove the battery from the laptop, then remove the power cord. Press and hold the power button for 10 seconds.

Release, attach the power cord. Press the power button.

Odds are, this will not work, but let's test it.

The symptom you describe are not related to anything you did...they are componant level failures, either the motherboard or the dc to dc board. These are generally not fixable by owners.

I ran into a tech once who swears that this can also be caused by a battery failure -- not the battery that powers the laptop, but a small battery pack that looks like several peas in a pea pod.

I know, not good news. The point is, it's not your fault and it was just a coincidence this occured while your other problem occured

[thirning]

As you predicted, it did not work. The same thing happened, the power light came on for a few secodns but nothing happened, no sound, nothing on the screen. Whatever is wrong, it must be catching, our desktop computer was in the shop last month for a new motherboard!! The little caps on what looked like 4 little batteries were popped up instead of flat. The guy at Best Buy said it was really unusual. So, now the laptop is following suit. Can we upgrade a laptop? I'd like to have a higher Windows version running but due to the age and capacity of this machine currently, we could not. Maybe it will give us a new start. Or, should we just scrap it and buy a new laptop? Thanks so much for ALL your help!!

Terri

[gerryf]

Terri, upgrading a laptop is typically not an option---laptops are tightly integrated with the only option generally being a new harddrive and more memory---you can if you are more ambitious add a newer CPU to them, but this is not recommended since the cooling systems are typically designed for the CPUs that ship.

The little caps....you mean on the desktop? Sounds like the capacitors blew. And now this.....get a lot of power fluctuations in your house?

Is it repairable, or is it junk? That depends on what the cause is. Motherboard=expensive. DC to DC board..not so, but getting the part is tricky.

CPU, back to expensive.

It sounds like a fairly old laptop--given that, it would probably cost more to repair it then it's worth...windows 98......at least 5 years old. A laptops lifetime is generally less than that.

[thirning]

Thank you so much for all of your help. A shopping I must go!!

Terri