my dad has a really weird computer virus

[keltik]

so my dad just called me saying he updated his computer and when it restarted he has a spider in the top left corner of the screen and it is making a color bar type shaping of the US. when he presses the Esc key the colors change and "morph/mutate" as he puts it. the Esc key is the only one that functions.

so what the hell is going on here?

[keltik]

bump

[koffee]

Yeah I have seen many versions of this it was a funny thing to do to people’s computer 5 or so years ago. Try setting your screen saver to none. If it is the screen saver version that will dtop it and let you work to remove it without seeing the dumb spider. I am looking through my notes to see what we did to totally remove it. But it may take a bit as it was a while ago.

CHEERS - Koffee

[keltik]

koffee I wish it were that simple but he lives alone and never uses a screen saver. he said he restarted the computer five times and can't even enter the CMOS. if this is some kind of screen saver prank then I will set his computer on fire while it's duck taped to his ass.

[koffee]

does he have a boot disc that may have come with the comp? If so boot up with that and get it into safe mode. From there you can start the good fight.

When it spins up what funtionality does he have?

CHEERs - Koffee

[keltik]

no boot disc. when it spins up it just goes directly to the "spider screen". he can change the colors with the Esc key.

EDIT: by spin up are you referring to the non existent boot disc?

[Frank Delicious]

You probably need to go over there and run some anti-malware stuff or just have him back up his important stuff and reformat and reinstall.

[keltik]

well I'm going there tomorrow anyway. I'll probably leave some interesting posts tomorrow afternoon.

[koffee]

hmm if this is not a home built comp it might have an automatic recovery ability that will bring it back to factory defaults. As it is starting from a restart spam the letter R and see if this brings you to a recovery mode. I don’t know what brand this is but off the top of my head I can think of four big comp makers that use this.

CHEERs - Koffee

[keltik]

It's an Acer Laptop if that helps.

[koffee]

I am not sure about an acer but just spam R and see if a menu appears

CHEERS - Koffee

[jubuttib]

Usually you can get to safe-mode by hitting F8 while the computer is booting up. But yeah, I'd just download the bitdefender rescue disc and try that.

[biodarwin]

Safe Mode + Combofix

Research both..

[bill]

Safe Mode + Combofix

Research both..

agree. combofix is ftw. http://www.combofix.org/

best malware tool i've used. they update it often.


you may want to download it and take it to him on a cd or thumbdrive.

[keltik]

well gents I have figured out what happened. It was not a software failure/virus. It was a drunk heavy handed old man failure. he was huluing the last episode of 24 and picked up the laptop using his best pinch grip and cracked the screen. All of your help is much appreciated but I now have a laptop to be recycled. I'll take pictures of it tonight to show what happened.

much love,

kel