The girlfriend is on a Compaq laptop running Windows98.
Day before yesterday, a board she frequents seemed to be having problems. (Disappearing posts, severe slowness, search functions bollixed up badly) Subsequently, her own computer became slow and unresponsive. She would click the go-away X widget and 25 seconds later the window would close; move the mouse and it would track along on-screen only after a 3-second pause (then jump). Sounds like some kind of seriously intense background process, doesn’t it?
Yesterday she crashed bad and ugly. “HIMEM.SYS cannot be found”. I copied files from a backup CD of her WINDOWS\SYSTEM folder onto Zip, loaded the GUEST.EXE program from her A drive to make her Zip drive work, and replaced the contents of WINDOWS\SYSTEM with the backup of same using DOS commands. Got her rebooted OK after that. [admit it: that wasn’t half bad PC geekwork for a Mac person!]
By bedtime last night, her computer was again bogging down. She had, of course, been back to the same board.
OK, question: do any of those new viruses (nimda, Code Red, etc) that infect servers pass themselves along to plain vanilla Windows machines that aren’t running IIS?
