gabeNC said:
... but to pin it on software imho would be a stretch.
I'm not pinning the failure of the system on software. Trust me, it was the 1/4" lightning bolt from my finger to the end of the USB cable as I reached for my calculator, which was lying next to the cable on the tabletop. My PC was fine until that event, then the problems started.
At first, I would press the power button and the system power would come on for about 3-5 seconds, then turn off. Sometimes it would come back on by itself after a few seconds, then shut off again. I would repeat this 3 - 5 times (oftentimes cycling the main power by using the power switch on the back of the PC) and then it would come on and stay on. One time it took 8 tries to get the PC to stay on. A few times, during what should have been the BIOS splash screen, it was scrambled, unreadable garbage. Not just gibberish, but rather what appeared to be a video signal with no sync. The system would lock up at that point, requiring another boot attempt. When the system would finally boot, it would seem to act fairly normal, with the exception that sometimes a "click" was heard from within the PC and the HDD would spin down and then spin back up. At this point, the system would sometimes hang, other times not.
On the last time I was able to boot the system, Norton indicated my virus signatures were out of date by 365,000+ days and I was unable connect to the server at Symantec to download new virus signatures. It was at that time I turned the system off for the final time, removed the HDD, had it scanned for viruses (by an IT guy here at work) and checked for damaged files and data loss. Avast found what it reported was a trojan during the scan. The file was removed and the drive re-scanned, with no indication of the trojan remaining. It's entirely possible that this instance was a false positive, but the earlier instance certainly wasn't. That is, unless a false positive displays a dark green screen with black text that says "YOU ARE INFECTED" at boot up and requires an HDD re-format and OS re-install to remove the problem.
I have since bought a new PC with an Asus P8H61-M motherboard with an Intel CPU, 4GB ram, a 500GB HDD and Win 7 Pro 64-bit.
@paetoni -- Sorry for seemingly hijacking your thread, but I got the feeling that Nigel and gabeNC were interested in the details of my story.