Strange Virus
Recently my computer at home hasn’t been working well, maybe because of a kind of virus. Sometimes a string of characters appears; for example, ‘￥￥￥////’ or ‘zzzzzzzz’ come up everywhere on the screen. Such characters appear even on the Start button, so that I can’t run any programs or change users. Other times, the characters appear in the address bar or search bar, so I can’t use any search engines.
I guess this phenomenon occurs due to a kind of virus. It isn’t very persistent, though: it doesn’t always happen when I use the computer, but it troubles me anyway. Have you ever met such virus? Or do you know about it? If you do, please tell me how to deal with it!
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Tawawa Help Desk, my name is Rudolf. How can I help you? =)
For a translation of what Graham just said: for “OS issue” read: “there’s something wrong with your copy of Windows XP” (OS=operating system).
A “screen shot” is a snaphot of what your monitor display looks like at any given moment. On a Windows box, you can take one by pressing the “Print Screen | Sys Rq” button at the top of your keyboard, right next to the F12 button. This will copy an image of your monitor display to your clipboard. Next, open a graphics program such as MS Paint, which should come with Windows XP (I think it should, that is: look under Start | Programs | Accessories), then open a new file and select Edit | Paste from the menu bar. This will copy the snapshot into your graphics program. Then save it as a .gif or a .jpg file (not a .bmp file!) and e-mail it to me as an attachment.
Yes, my computer has a virus scanner. Today I examined all files and disk drives with the scanner, but no viruses were found.
Recently, I installed Mozilla and HydraIRC in order to join the #tawawa chat channel. But I don’t know much about either of them. Ruedi-sensei suggested I should install them, so he must know about that.
Thank you, our big boss, Mr Anmann=)
Now my computer works well. But something becomes wrong, I’ll send you the snapshot.
Since the virus scanner didn’t turn up anything, you might want to try Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy.
Ruedi and Graham, thank you for your help about my computer problem.
Yesterday, I brought him to a computer doctor. I wish he will come back soon :)
No problem.
The screen shot you sent did seem to bespeak a hardware issue, so calling the computer doctor was the sensible thing to do.
Unrelated: do all women think of their computers as “he”? Do all men think of their computers as “she”? I’ve got two LAN connections here at my office; when asked by the IT folks to provide host names for the respective workstations, I supplied female names in both cases.
English-speaking sailors have been referring to their ships and boats as females for centuries. More recently, car owners — males, most of them — have followed the practice.
I wonder: do humans who enter a close emotional relationship with a piece of machinery always think of that piece of machinery as a member of the sex they’re attracted to?
Ruedi, I’m sorry I don’t know about that. I called my PC ‘he’ just as a joke, and I’d like to call it with a friendly word. I think ‘it’ implies a sort of cold nuance.
I think all computers are females, even in Spanish you call them with the female article: “la computadora.” But for the humans that feel attracted to the male sex, to use Ruedi’s expression, there’s the expression “el ordenador.” Just pick the one that fits you better, I guess.
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I suppose the first question would be: Do you have a virus scanner, and is it up to date? I have to say that it sounds more like an OS issue though. Can you get a screen shot of it? Have you recently installed any software on it?