Very strange PC problem

[dplax]

My PC has slowed down to about a tenth of its speed between two reboots, and it also performs random reboots, and for the first time in four years I got a blue screen of death...The PC is a Toshiba Satellite laptop with 256 MB RAM and a Celeron 2600 and had so far been running quite nicely.

First I thought it was a spyware or a virus, but Avast, Adaware and Spybot did not find anything. Then I checked my firewall logs. First strange thing was that 40% of the blocked traffic was high rated, which was disproportionally higher than before, the second thing was that there were a lot of NETBios session attempts being blocked from computers in the starman.ee domain, who after some search seem to be an estonian broadband provider. So I wanted to block the whole domain, but I couldn't do that with the free version of ZoneAlarm, so I downloaded Sygate and blocked it.

The very slow speed still persisted and while running msconfig I encountered a blue screen of death...

The error it gave me was a kernel data inpage error and it also said something about atapi.sys, but I did not have any time to read it as the PC restarted.

Checking with google on the error it told me that it was a memory error due to faulty hardware device or a virus. Thinking that Avast might have missed something the first time round I tried scanning again. Got a reboot fifteen minutes into the scan. This wasn't due to overheating since when my PC does that it just simply switches off and doesn't want to switch on for several long minutes. Another try with Avast brought the same results. I felt the temperature of the back and bottom of the laptop just to be sure, and it wasn't unnaturally hot.

Anyone have any idea what might be causing the problem?

I'm currently restoring back to two days ago, in case the problem came from something which got installed or installed itself in those two days.

[Hivetyrant]

Might not be software related at all, make sure all your fans are running and if you can, try some hardware stressing software to make sure you dont have some buggered memory or something like that [img]smile.gif[/img]

[dplax]

Since I'm not much of a hardware man myself I'll ask what hardware stressing software you would recommend.

[Madman-Rogovich]

I'd recommend taking a dustbuster too it. My lady friend's laptop started acting mental and all it need was a wee hoover

[dplax]

A minor update: since the restoration to the status of two days before the speed has considerably increased, quite close to where it was. I'm still not sure whether the problem is completely gone, and what had caused it though.

[Bungleau]

Head over to Trendmicro and do an on-line scan. They'll check for viruses and malware... and may give you different results than you've experienced before.

And, to echo wisdom from TDC, it's usually a wise move to disable the system restore and clean everything up from safe mode... before it has a chance to load. Just be sure to re-enable the system restore afterwards...

You also didn't mention HiJack This. I'd grab the latest copy and run it... it's different from the other malware-eliminators in that instead of looking for known bad things and correcting them, it highlights known potentially bad behaviors (like registry settings) and lets you fix them. Careful, though... it's a potent tool. Research everything before you decide to blow it away.

[dplax]

Thanks for the suggestion Bungleau, but I had actually forgotten mentioning that. I did run HijackThis, but it did not find anything suspicious.

[Ziroc]

Something in the new settings before the restore may have been using the RAM or video card it sounds like. When you share IRQs and stuff, it can cause issues.

Or its the ram going bad. (Hope not).

Hope your restore fixed it!

[Variol (Farseer) Elmwood]

Geez dplax, you're usually the one with the answers?!?!?
How you been anyway?

[dplax]

Since the restore I have run tests again (Adaware, Spybot, Avast, HijackThis and the TrendMicro online scan you suggested Bungleau) and apart from a few relatively harmless tracking cookies they didn't find anything, so I still don't know what had caused the problems.

Hopefully it's gone now. I have my fingers crossed at least.

Variol: I've been busy with university, as we had quite a few projects. And most of the time I only posted on IW in the roleplay section, so that might explain why I'm not usually seen by a lot of people. How have you been?