Attention computer guru's....

[Original Sin]

Ok, for all you computer guru's out there, I have a technical problem.

My parents computer has been on the fritz all night. It was downloading a virus scan update, or said it was, and has been all night long...I come home from work a half hour ago, and it's still 'downloading.' I wanna restart the computer, but it won't let me. So I try to end the process for the virus scan download....it freezes up on me. I wait, still frozen. I try to turn the computer off manually, and it won't respond. I wait, try again: Same damn thing. So, I have to resort to pulling the plug on the damn thing....Yeah, bad news, but I didn't have a choice.
So, I wait a while, turn it back on, and windows won't start properly. I try booting in safe mode, I try restoring the last configurations, but every time it pops up with this blue screen, then shuts it self off and tries to restart before I can even read what's on the blue screen. It's been doing that for about 15 minutes now.
I'm not sure if I fried something in the computer or what, so any thoughts from out there would be appreciated, if they're constructive that is. For the record, the PC was fucked to begin with: Auto updates were disabled by a virus, I think, and it was riddled with spy ware. I planned on wiping/restoring the whole damn thing this weekend, but.....well, now I'm here.

[Gatekeeper]

I'm gonna go ahead and bet that it probably took a dump on itself while it was doing the update, and your powercycling of it didn't make a difference. I probably powercycle machines at work five times a day, sometimes while in the middle of system-critical operations, and it rarely causes problems Windows can't fix on a reboot.

So my guess it was nerfed in the process of doing the update, which is why it froze, and it wouldn't have snapped out of it no matter how you rebooted it. Now, what can you do about it? If the hard drive has vital data you need to get off, you'll have to slave it into another machine and then just drag+drop.

If there is no data you need to get off, I say just go ahead with your reformatting.

[Original Sin]

Well, there wasn't much I could do about data recovery, so I used the restore CD's that came with the thing and wiped the hard drive and reinstalled windows. It seems to be running fine now, asside from a few problems I had to fix with the modem. Other than that, it works...parents won't be happy when they find out everything is gone, but hey...I warned em.

[sam]

look closely at the blue screen that's a stop message.

read at the bottom and it'll tell you the driver that is failing

use the windows xp disc and boot into the recovery console and use chkdsk on it. the ntfs filesystem probably just needs a little tap on the ass.

[Original Sin]

I only had the manufacturer's restore disks, not the actual XP discs. The only option the disk had was to wipe the harddrive and reinstall, so I just went with that one.

[chocobojoe]

So is the computer still running well after the system restore?

[Riot]

There is no apostrophe in gurus.

[LikeableRodent]

There is no apostrophe in gurus.

You blind? He obviously put an apostrophe in it.

[Original Sin]

There is no apostrophe in gurus.

You blind? He obviously put an apostrophe in it.

Lol, aside from the obvious WTF at seeing this threat necro'd, that was the first thing that came to my mind, too.

Embarrassing bad grammar is embarrassing.