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Weeeeeeeird Computer Problem

P

PowerMac4Ever

Banned
Ok, so at work, one of these computers has a weeeeeeeeeeeeird computer problem. After opening up MS Excel (2K), all the text turns into gibberish after ~20 minutes of use. I have no idea what's causing this! All the text just becomes wierd characters. This isn't just the text in the document. The text under icons, in menus, and everywhere else turns into this wierd hieroglyphic shizznit too. "Restart the computer" you say? HA! The problem is still there. It goes away after I shut down the system and boot up. Again, this happens about 20 minutes after running Excel. Now... I'm thinking it *could* be a virus of some sort. Any ideas?

Again... weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeird!

Help me AT/OT Style!
 
Hmm, just got wierder. Booted up the computer this morning and all the icons were messed up and the gibberish text was there. This was without running Excel or anything! Ah! A hard reboot fixed that problem... temporarily.

Looks like it's Code Red!!!
 
Have you run a virus scan? Do your basic troubleshooting, do ANYthing besides just rebooting your box.
So much for being leet eh.
 
Could possibly be bad RAM... I had a similar problem a while ago...
I tried desperately to figure out what was wrong for more than a week as the problems got worse and worse (started with the text thing) and eventually ended up stopping me from getting into Windows and just continually running the registry checker to "repair" a problem in an infinate loop of rebooting. It stopped me from going into safe mode, saying that system files were missing (when they actually weren't because I looked for them on the hdd in dos and found them.) Reinstalling didn't fix problems and only caused more. I eventually ended up switching out various pieces of hardware and discovered that the ram was the problem.

Probably more info than you needed but, anyway, it could be the ram 😕
 
Hmm... bad ram eh? I don't think this computer's memory has ever been upgraded. If so, it hasn't been upgraded in quite some time. Does this sort of thing happen to old memory too?

Also, it's like a 6 year Compaq. We're getting rid of all of our Old POS Compaqs and will be getting New POS Compaqs in February. Soooo, I have to put up this junk for 3 more months. Unfortunately, there's no virus scanner installed... so I have to install one. BUT, they locked up the computer good with security software. It'll be weeks before they even begin to think about deciding on considering possibly letting me disable the security software so I could do my thang. So, that's the dilemma.
 
Well.. it could very well be bad ram, especially considering how old it is.

You might want to install and run a virus scanner if possible before you do anything to the hardware.

Otherwise, ram is dirt cheap 🙂
 
bacillus, it uses one of those ancient video cards that didn't need fans! So that's probably not he problem. I'm leaning towards the RAM thing.

Thanks for all your advice. Hopefully I can get a virus scanner installed tomorrow. If it isn't a virus, I guess I'll open up one of the "spare" Compaqs in 'back and steal some memory.
 
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