I must confess I forgot the first rule of PC maintenance. ‘Take it slow and do not make any moves without thinking about it twice’.
My Wife suddenly announced that her PC had a virus, and that Bitdefender had done its job, identified it and quarantined it.
So far so bad – it was a W32 Trojan, so quite an old one, so I just ran a full system scan. Hours later I got the all-clear, but on testing the PC kept seizing up and ‘black screening’.
Memory problem I thought, so next was a full RAM check, but that came back clean.
Damn – the Trojan must still be there – so I did a full off-line scan of the drives and all was clean. Easy peasy – I’ll just do a full restore from Synology – but I could not log in ‘Too many bad attempts so your IP address is locked’. That is when panic started!
It took what seemed ages to find out how to log on to Synology, and I started to worry about the other network connected devices. The headless chicken routine got under way.
Luckily, before doing very much, I again sat at my wife’s computer and found that one of her drives was full to the brim, and between blacked out screens I found that the PC had only a couple of Mb of spare virtual memory. That finally was when I twigged that the over-full drive was also the paging memory location and that all the ancillary problems had been caused by her computer calling up corrupt virtual memory causing screen blanking undue attempts to log on to Synology and all the signs of a badly pwned computer..
I reorganized her disk drives and cleaned out the crud and all came good. I now need to increase her RAM and add more disk capacity, but at least I no longer feel like a headless chicken.
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