My buddy was having problems with his computer, and he asked me what causes this blue screen that kept coming up. (Blue screen of death) I said well somin is considerbly wrong with his computer so he took it into a shop. But I was sitting at home, thinkin...what really causes somin like the blue screen of death, or your computer to just crash. I know viruses, etc can do that...but how do they? What does a virus or trojan, or anything considered as hostile do to your computer? What is the extent of sominthing that crawls it's way into your computer threw e-mail or internet such as a virus, or spam? And how do some programs get corrupted?
I'd really appreciate if someone can take the time to tell me.


Gen,

Hey SurGen!

Well that is quite the question, as there are a multitude of issues that can cause BSOD's Lockup's etc...

IMHO 90% of the time unless the motherboard is really poorly made, BSOD's are caused by bad Ram...

If his computer is one of the later P3's or early P4's, that was the time there was a bad batch of Capacitors in the industry, the company that made the Electrolyte (The juice between the layers of a Cap) would breakdown and cause the Cap to stop working properly... You can tell these bad Caps as they are all puffed out with a powdery substance caked on them. (Looks something like battery acid on old car battery terminals) Once the Caps stop working properly they can cause many different problems with the board, Lockup's, Random ReBoots etc...

As far a Viruses and Spyware, most of those are poorly written pieces of code.

When you make a program that you want others to use, you start by creating the program and get it working properly. Then you have to make the program "idiot proof" with all kinds of error checking... There are so many things that you don't think of, that's why they have beta testers, to beat on the program and find the bugs. So when Joe User decides he's going to paste a 45 page document into a phone number field, your program will just dump his data, show him an error box and wait for proper input. Poorly written programs try to process this data and end up crashing as it trys to place this data in memory or a table.
Really poorly written ones will pop up a error dialog every 15 characters complaining numeric data only and proceed to fill the screen with them till the 45 pages are finished or the program runs out of memory...

Viruses and Spyware are very much the poorly written pieces of code, viruses have to be very small so there isn't any error checking code in them as they perform a very specific task. They also don't follow any programing guidelines and will write date to memory locations without checking if that memory is already in use first by some other program. All of a sudden Boom! the program you were running has bad code in the middle of it and it crashes. Viruses don't play by the rules, (they are not supposed to) they write to what they want, when they want and by whatever means necessary to ensure they are running and will stay running...

Programs can get corrupted when they save bad data back to the hard drive... As in some games that have a save game bug (and there are many of those... ) where certain events or sequences or inventory items are not supposed to be there and they get written out to the game state file when you save...
Next time you load your save game, game flags get set from the data in your save that are not supposed to be set yet and you can't complete a section or a door will not open or if the data is bad enough the game will crash back to the windows desktop...

Hope this helps some...

Anyone else can chime in here anytime to add, agree, disagree etc...

thanks...I never knew any of that information. Ok if Viruses and Spyware are poorly written peices of code. Which I assume someone would learn in a Computer Science course? What is Spam and is it true it downloads stuff off the internet, but in the shadows of your computer where you can't see?

I find myself a little computer-smart now that I knw wat 'hostile' viruses, etc...do to a computer and why...but I have a long way to go...
Thanks Troll

Gen,

Spam is just the unwanted mail that arrives in your email daily... Watches, Stocks etc... It's the Spam that has Attachments or Malicious ActiveX headers (Which is why no one should use Outlook Express) that you have to watch out for, if you run the Attachment or even open the ActiveX message you'll possibly execute a program that is made to download other files off the internet...

These programs rarely have any visible windows, they usually won't show up in the task list, they will change registry entries so that they get executed at boot time which makes them hard to get rid of without a knowledge of how to get rid of such programs... Overall just nasty...

I've seen brand new P4 3Ghz machines leave our shop and end up back in a week, where it takes at least 10 minutes after you boot it up before you can try and do anything on it.... Chock full of spyware, the internet as the customer finds out is just full of "Free Software" and things...

Like everything else, most "Free Stuff" comes with baggage attached... And when you get enough of this stuff on your machine things start to bog down from all these process's runnig in the background poping up windows with AD's and other assorted "Lovelies"...

I just love service calls in the office's where one machine in the corner is poping up pr0n windows on a regular basis...

Some Good ol'e internet guidelines...

You MUST have a virus scanner installed WORKING and UPDATED... Avast, AVG, Norton, McAfee whatever... it's all a matter of taste as to the brand...

Uncheck "Hide Extensions for know file types" in My Computer / Tools / Folder Options / View
That way you'll know when "openme.txt" is really a text file and not "openme.txt.exe" nasty program...

Install Firefox and Thunderbird as your browser and email program...
(Websites can put spyware and viruses on your computer as well by just going to a page on the site that has it... This is why you should NOT use Internet Explorer...)

Keep Internet Explorer for Windows Updates and those rare Secure sites you might have to log into...
Add / Remove Outlook Express right off the machine.

Do not open ANY Attachments unless you have asked for the file to be sent to you. Even if it comes from family and friends... The first thing mass mailer viruses do is go through the infected computers address book and mail copies of itself to everyone on the list...

So when OPENME.txt.exe arrives from Aunt Dorothy... You'll know it's not a text file right off the start as you've already unhid the file extensions, and anything with a double extension should set the danger flag.
Any .COM .BAT .EXE .SCR .VBS will execute... so "nicepicture.jpg.scr" is NOT a picture as well as "nicesong.mp3.vbs" is NOT a song... It's really the virus mailing you not Aunt Dorothy...

Delete the message immediately and dont play curious george by running it to see what it does, or to see if your virus checker will catch it...

Be careful of what you download, if your curious about a program "Google" the name of it and there will most likely be reports from people if it has spyware attached to it or not...

You want to really slow a machine down, put Google Desktop on it...

Fun Yet?

Nice Bro

I got FireFox goin but with Thunderbird can I keep my e-mail address?


SurGen,

Sure can, it will import all your Outlook Express settings...


Thanks Bro

The man is a true master on the bit machine, lucky to have him around.

hey I like fireFox and Thunderbird better then my old IE, and OE....I love these things...thanks a loads Troll...


Gen,

Your Welcome Gen... That's what 4Peeps is all about!




Thanks Biggy...