Is this a virus or not?

I have an hp laptop, xp pro, 1 meg memory 3 gig processor.
It suddenlty started rebooting over and over again. Long story short, the support people said it was a virus and mcafee is no good. reformated drive everything resintalled.
Brought the system home, connected to wireless network and it started rebooting again.

I downloaded nod32 , ran in safe mode but I it stops and I get one of two messages :

1 ) [4] cannot open file. file in use, then scanning stops after 8,000 files

2) Error occured while scanning operating memory.

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

Hi Marcon33, welcome to Wilders, can you please try following the steps located in post number 2 here: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=47830

Hope this helps...

Let us know how you go...

Cheers

 

You mean a Gig of memory

 

Thanks fo r the quick replies! I will go thru all those steps on my other computers while I wait to get me laptop back from the shop. The repair shop is a large US electronics chain with a service department called the "GEEK SQUAD". We will see how good they are.

 

here is an update, 5 weeks later and there is nothing turning up on diagnostics run by the service people that would explain why the system started rebooting by iteself. They reloaded os xp first time and second time reformatted drive.
I got notebook back and ran the exact steps recommended by Blackspear although I only ran them one time.
No viruses, nothing.
Everything seems to work although I got a blue screen and the error
system32/drivers/ntfs.sys file corrupted or missing

I powered off and it came back.

Any suggestions or comments on what you would do?

 

Sounds like you have a bad sector on the HDD... or a bad IDE controller...

-Tone

 

You could try placing the Windows CD in the drive, click start> run type in CMD, when the black window opens type in "sfc /scannow" SFC (System File Checker, a part of Windows File Protection) will replace any changed/damaged system files with a clean copy. SFC may not solve every problem, but it's a good start that anyone can do.

Hope this helps...

Let us know how you go.

Cheers

 

If that doesn't work, try running scan disk/Check disk aswell, Right click on C:, goto tools, then run Error Checking, do the full check with both ticks on.

After that i would Check the RAM, you may need 3rd party software to do that, but i guess if the Geek Squad ran diagnostics on it, and it is ok, then it may be ok.

Other wise if the sfc /scannow that blackspear suggested also doesn't work, try a standard windows repair by booting from the windows CD, then view the current Windows installations, then choose 'R' to repair the current one, but don't press 'R' on the screen to go to the recovery console, as this is not what you want unless you know how to manually replace %windows%/system32/drivers/ntfs.sys

some things to try anyway

 

If you get an error scanning operating memory, I presume the nod32krn service is not running and because of this the NOD32 Control Center is not running either. Could you confirm or deny it?

 

You could try Memtest86 for a second opinion. It found problems for me when every other mem diagnostic came up with nothing.

http://www.memtest86.com/

 

Hi try updating your bios, and check the settings, other that that it sounds like bad hardware.

 

Thanks so much for the responses and sorry for not getting back to you sooner.

I believe ( fingers crossed) that it is a memory problem. I paid someone to look into it and they found that when 1 of the 2, 512kb memory sticks was removed the xp os lloaded with no problem. The "geek squad" gave me a new memory card when I told them this. They are just glad to get rid of me.
I need to reinstall NOD32 and I am thinking that the memory error I was getting before will not occur now.

Thanks again for the awesome responses!