I've had continuous rproblems with a Toshiba P100 and always felt there was avirus lurking somewhere even if all scans shoed a clean computer. Around last November I started getting blue secreens pointing to the NVidia driver. After a few days I was unable to strat the system anylonger, so I took it to the shop where I bought and they reckoned it was the graphics chip. It is true that over the last few months before the computer gave up it was very hot. I phoned theToshiba appointed technical workshop that told me the problem that I described was well known to them in the P100 and there was nothing they could do; better to use while I could and then throw it away...
Anyway, I left the laptop with the original shop and was told that it needed a new motherboard. I refused and took it home. I tried the Recovery disk but the blue screen came up again referring to the NVIdia driver. I kept trying with the same results until at the forth try I managed to get the Windows Desktop, but various MS boxes came up telling me that there were seriuos errors and I should send info to MS. I did. Amazingly, gradully the messages diasappeared and the computer settled down to complete normality. I started to assume that the problem had to do with the unavailibility of a Toshiba graphics driver for the XP SP3. So, I refused the SP3 and carried on with SP2.
All was fine until now. I decided to a boot scan (an earlier sacn showed no problems) and I got 3 files infected with Win32:Pup-gen (PuP). How can that be? I have not copied any old files to the computer. The only thing I did since the recovery was to download Avast and Poppeeper, apart from Office 2003. I hve not been on any funny webpages. So my questions are
a) is it possible that the virus infected the recovery disk when I put it in, or that the virus was somewhere that stays from the original instalation (menory, bios, etc)?
b) what should I do now to make sure this virus goes away for ever? I chose to send it to the Chest.
Thank you very much for your help on this.
qim