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General discussion

Dark screen

Mar 26, 2004 2:23PM PST

Hi,

I have a Toshiba (3000-s353) 900 mghz laptop. It has Window ME as operating system with no antivirus programs-I know!!. Anyway, While I was on the net at somesite & I do not remember which site, it froze & all keys became useless including on/off botton. So, I unpluged the power and battery. Now, when I turn the machine on, the indicator lights come on but the screen is black and I do not hear the machine trying to access the HD. Any thoughts as how I go about fixing this problem? Thanks

Discussion is locked

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(NT) This seems like some hardware failure. Have it repaired.
Mar 26, 2004 11:36PM PST

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Yes. A virus can DAMAGE the machine.
Mar 27, 2004 12:12AM PST
http://www.cert.org/incident_notes/IN-99-03.html

"Once the CIH virus activates, the virus attempts to erase the entire hard drive and to overwrite the system BIOS. Some machines may require a new BIOS chip to recover if overwritten by the CIH virus. CIH only affects Win95/98 machines."

While you may think you are safe since you had Windows ME, such is not the case. Given the age of this bug, it wouldn't be hard for Jane Viruswriter to update it to get other OSes. In short, this is just one bug of note. There are others.

With Free AVG from http://www.grisoft.com I wonder why a person would go without an antivirus and risk it all?

I hope that the repair doesn't cost too much and it's always not the best way to learn the lesson about this.

Bob