Locked up on restart...

[joedogma]

Here is the situation, I was playing World of Warcraft earlier today and my computer suddenly rebooted. Never happened before but then after it rebooted, I notice that I cannot open any programs, windows, or anything at all really. The HD light is flickering and the CPU usage is running at about 80% (about the only window that will open is the con/alt/del window). Its appears to be "working" on something but I have now idea what and my system is crippled. I tried to let it run itself out but it doesn't stop. I tried rebooting a bunch of times to same effect. I get a normal windows background, startup programs appear to load (I cant verify b/c nothing works) and it hangs. I think it is a virus (cant run a scan though) so I was going to reformat but I wanted thoughts if any body thinks this may be a hardware problem. Ideas or suggestions on how to proceed is much appreciated....

My setup..

Win XP Pro with SP2
Pentium 4 2.6c 800 frontside bus
1 gig ram
ASUS PC4800 Delux MOBO
80 gig HD
20 gig secondary HD non SATA config
Brand name PSU

System is about almost 2 years old, no problems like this in past

Thanks in advance...

 

[montag451]

Hi,
Try rebooting in SAFE mode [tap F8 when switching on]

Look in
CONTROL PANEL
ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS
EVENT VIEWER
and tell us what you see.
Include all the X's and !'s [at least the most common ones] = Source + Event ID + any text

What Antivirus do you use?
What firewall do you use?
What anti spyware do you use?

If nothing = then you get a big slap on the wrist.

 

[CycloWizard]

I'd boot into safe mode and run a virus scan first. Can't you check what is using the processor power? If you get into the task manager (ctrl-alt-del) and go to processes, then from the "View" menu, go to "Select Columns" and choose "CPU Usage" and "CPU Time". This should tell you right away what's using the processor power.

 

[joedogma]

Well...I reboot one last time to see if the problem went away and I get an error message from the Steam program. Never saw this message before. I was able to shutdown steam, delete all the valve garbage on my PC and all is well with the world again. Thanks for the advice, I will safe boot in the future if I have a similar problem. I was so close to wiping my system..WHEW!