Can Viruses actually damage your PC?

Yes some can. Like the CIH Chernoybl virus would fry the BIOS chip on the motherboard, and if that's destroyed the computer's worthless unless you were a damn good solderer.
 
Mattu said:
Yes some can. Like the CIH Chernoybl virus would fry the BIOS chip on the motherboard, and if that's destroyed the computer's worthless unless you were a damn good solderer.
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Not the whole computer... Just the motherboard.

But you shouldn't have to worry about that virus, because there should be Anti-Virus Updates to prevent it from executing ;)
 
Mattu said:
Yes some can. Like the CIH Chernoybl virus would fry the BIOS chip on the motherboard, and if that's destroyed the computer's worthless unless you were a damn good solderer.
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Wow now i didnt know that
:eek:

I learn lots of things from this place:D
 
you shouldn't get an explosion though! lol.
The New viruese are getting worst and worst. Darn! they are disgusted!
 
Some can really mess up your harddrive, and even survive formatting. Others i have heard can mess with BIOS features and cause the computer to overhet, etc. But they are usually targeted, and very specific.
 
yes this is true, my friend showed me a website called the black gate something. He is a hacker and got a pass to it. We hooked up a old laptop of his and he sent the virus to his email address.......he then checked his email with the old laptop...then after 2 hours of it running....all of a sudden we hear it cut off.......so we go over there and try to turn it back on....nothing...turned out psu had overheated....his plan had worked and I have never again opened another email from him.
 
Rambo said:
But you shouldn't have to worry about that virus, because there should be Anti-Virus Updates to prevent it from executing ;)
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It mostly only affected the motherboards based off the Intel 440xx chipsets.
 
Like the CIH Chernoybl virus would fry the BIOS chip on the motherboard
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Many of the old BIOSes from the age of that virus, it's very hardware specific, so it wouldn't affect new soldered ones, but many from that era were the good old large pin insert and pry out kind of BIOS chips, I remember I used to mod those BIOSes a few years back.

The New viruese are getting worst and worst. Darn! they are disgusted!
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That's why I believe it's best to do as much as you can off of Windows.

Some can really mess up your harddrive, and even survive formatting.
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Yep, they're called boot sector viruses, they get themselves hidden in the MBR, and they can do damage to even a Windows re-install, such as messing with llsas (spelling?), right off the bad. Usually they're code is only Windows specific, so it generally needs and OS, and Windows at that to do it's deed. Of course, proper tools can clean the MBR completely. There's also a virus that waits until a machine is like 5 minutes idle, then starts to absolutely grind on the hdd for wear and tear, runs 100% CPU so it wears down the fans and everything, and can sometimes do heat damage. It also turns off, IIRC, the Windows ACPI services to manage temp shutdowns.
Others i have heard can mess with BIOS features and cause the computer to overhet, etc. But they are usually targeted, and very specific.
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Yes, very specific, down to specific motherboard models nowadays, because of the complex architecture of motherboards these days. Many of these fake BIOS hacking sites, actually have BIOS viruses targeted to the specific model you download, basically, it comes down to the BIOS, if this BIOS is listed for these three boards, all 3 of them could be affected. BIOS was not designed for the age of virus, sadly we keep using it, a move to EFI would really be beneficial to the PC world. We could use all of it's advanced features and technologies, as well as it's built from the ground up with great security.
 
Johnny Five said:
can viruses damage your PC physically?

eg, can it damage the actual parts of your pc?

thanks.
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What Anti-Virus are you using? If you have a good one, and keep it updated, you shouldn't have a problem with getting Viruses.
 
4W4K3 said:
Ah, someone in the know. I didn't know the specifics, but you seem to have them covered :P

This is EFI basics, correct? - http://www.deviceforge.com/articles/AT4903582708.html
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Yep, but sadly, even the upcomping Vista doesn't support EFI booting. However, the Itanium versions of Windows do, IA-32 is different from the x86 we use. IA-32 does not stand for Intel Architecture 32 bit, it stands for Itanium Architecture 32 bit.
 
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