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Q: My computer has been crashing regularly. I have run the diagnostics that came with the computer and they have not detected any problems with my hardware. I have also scanned for viruses and spyware and the scans have shown my system to be clear. Any ideas as to what might be causing the problem?

A: During the last several months I have been encountering computer systems with these symptoms - frequent blue screens and system dumps as well as lock-ups and slow, sluggish response times.

Like you, I ran all kinds of tests and scans that failed to turn up any discernible issues.

On a hunch I decided to run a tool designed to detect a specific type of malware known as a boot sector virus and was surprised to find such viruses on several computers I was working on.

A boot sector virus is a particularly nasty piece of malware that targets the boot sector of a computers' hard drive - the part of the drive that contains the information or code that the computer looks for to begin loading the operating system. The basic input-output system (BIOS) reads this information and loads it in to random access memory so the computer can start up.

When the boot sector is compromised, it can cause the problems you are seeing. And the virus can be difficult to detect and remove. A boot sector virus is so embedded and tenacious that even formatting the hard drive and reinstalling the operating system will not get rid of it.

Short of removing the disk partition completely with something like Fdisk and then reinstalling the system software and applications, the only way I have found to remove this type of infection is to use either Hitman Pro from http://www.surfright.nl/en or Kaspersky's TDSS Killer, which can be downloaded from usa.kaspersky.com.

Kaspersky's TDSS Killer has worked about 75 percent of the time whereas Hitman Pro has successfully detected and removed the infection almost every single time. Unfortunately, Hitman Pro is not free while Kaspersky's TDSS Killer is.

My suggestion is to use the free tool first and see if it detects and cleans the problem. If it does, great. If it doesn't, then scan with Hitman Pro and pay the registration fee if it detects a problem.

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See original here:
Lee: Culprit in crashes may be virus in boot sector