my mother in law is bringing her computer round to me tomorrow coz it has crashed. switched off fine yesterday, but went to switch it on today and a message appeared on the screen saying ‘OOPS CRASHED’

another message then told her to press alt, ctrl and delete to enter task manager. when this window popped up there was no programs running at all.

Can’t remember what computer it is off hand (complete tower bought from ebuyer a while back for £183 pre built), but has anyone got any ideas what should i look for first as i haven’t come across this problem before. As soon as i get more info i will add more.

Have already posted this on a computer forum but thought i would ask here as i know the world of STW is full of peeps in the know 🙂

Cheers

YOU ARE IN DEEP DEEP SHIT!#

“OOPs crashed” – sounds like a virus / malware.

Pressing “ctrl -alt -delete” : starts what’s known as a ‘non-maskable-interupt’ (usually so you can see what tasks are running – or to devious fecker’s going their ugly way)

I’d thououghly recommend starting in safe mode and running avg / avast.

Do not plug it in to your home / work network when anything else on your home network is awake (inc phones/ipads etc).

Seriously

That PC has the virtual version of HIV.

Virtual version of hiv. Class!

I’d thououghly recommend starting in safe mode and running avg / avast.

Good advice – Download Avast on another machine and do a full scan

I wouldn’t muck about with it, download any linux distro, boot into linux, remove any precious data onto a USB stick / External hard drive. Format hard disk and reinstall windows.

Will probably be quicker in the long run.

EDIT:

Download this on a spare machine:
Linux DVD

or this if you haven’t got a DVD writer:
Linux CD

Burn it, then insert into the infected machine and reboot the infected machine. All being well it will boot straight into Linux, and will allow you to click and point your way around the old system to save anything you want to keep to an external drive.

If the screen doesn’t go green and look slightly different, you may have to change the ‘boot options’. When the computer starts, it’ll say ‘press F1’ or ‘F9’ to either ‘enter’ or ‘change settings’. Just look for the bit that makes the CDROM the first option.

HTH.

Is that PC running windows ?.

You’ll get “oops” messages on linux systems where you get panics/crashes.

If it is running linux, an AV scan might well do more harm than good. Google for some of the keywords in the oops backtrace, you might get more idea of what the problem is.

if you have another pc or laptop handy download malwarebytes and put it on a memory stick and load pooped pc in safemode and load and run malwarebytes and it will run and scan for any dodgy malware and delete them.