puter genius needed!!! Help!!

[historian]

My puter began turning itself off for no reason - ran virus scan - found blaster worm - removed it - and not its doing the same thing again - and now it keep saying not enough memory - could a faulty memory stick cause this????

[Florida_Geek]

1. Yes bad memory can cause

a lot of strange things to happen.

[Az]

2. Check for the Welchia virus as well

It was the bug that came out just after Blaster. Same symptems but was designed to kill the blaster. It did it poorly.

[talkingrain]

3. More info

I will try to help!

[historian]

4. thanks

its amd 2400 series running xp on 98 (i know thats not good but didnt have any choice in the matter). Has 128Ram (not much but its mostly for word processing) suddenly began shutting off for no reason. Changed the video card for another i had in the house andit ran well for awhile. Next day started again - found blaster worm - removed it - and now its starting again.
Pls dont say its a bad board - bad mem i can live with!
thanks

[Deja Q]

9. 128MB is pitiful, even for low-end use.

Try 256MB or play with shutting down unneeded services.

services.msc will get you to the basic screen, but be sure to study up before disabling anything.

I've been able to trim XP from using 140MB of RAM down to 90MB, but a some fringe benefits do get shut off...

[talkingrain]

11. You had

the blaster worm for sure! You mentioned that. Do: ALT+Ctrl+Del to bring up your task manager. Look for msblaster.exe or similer and shut down. (End task.) Go on line, and find tool to remove msblaster.exe (Google.com > enter "remove msblaster". Hope that helps

[sir_captain]

5. go to windows update

and make sure you have ALL of the security patches downloaded. there are some security leaks that can be taken advantage of even without a virus being technically active

[Deja Q]

6. I'd say there's another virus at work

Do a google search: "McAfee Stinger" - the top URL has the latest version and checks for the 40 most recent virii strains.

Bad memory modules would more likely cause freeze-ups rather than actual shutdown/power-offs.

With Winbloat, 90% of the "low memory"/"out of memory" errors are utterly bogus.

[cheezus]

7. 2 reasons:

does it alert you that it's shutting down in x seconds? then it's a worm/virus

if it just craps out on you it's probably the power supply.

[cprise]

8. Try booting your computer

..with this CD http://www.knoppix.net/

Then no more viruses.

[FlashHarry]

10. Do you have McAfee VirusScan? I had a similar problem.

When McAfee updated, it created massive temporary files that ate up all my HD space. Try searching for weird large .tmp files.