A few days ago my screen turned completly white and I was not able to do anything. I had to kill my PC with the power-button and restart it. Everything worked fine so I thought is was just some kind of system-crash.   But 5 minutes ago it happened again. I killed my PC again but it would not start for a few minutes. Only the fans started turning, but I could not even hear the high pitched sound  (which I think comes from the BIOS booting).   Now suddenly my PC was able to boot again and showed me this message in black on White while booting: "The Anti-Virus Software you have installed on your computer is now cleaning up.. Successfully done" (translated by me).  I googled a bit and found out there is ransomware going round that does exactly that. So may I be infested?  Even this message that my anti-virus program is cleaning up sounded pretty suspicious..
698
What should I do if my Windows computer seems to be infected with a virus or malware?  What are the symptoms of an infection? What should I do after noticing an infection? What can I do to get rid of it? how to prevent from infection by malware?   This question comes up frequently, and the suggested solutions are usually the same. This community wiki is an attempt to serve as the definitive, most comprehensive answer possible. Feel free to add your contributions via edits.
36580
Starting with windows 8 I have many many many hardware issues (that are not present in Windows 7). One of these issues is the fact that an initiated restart does not work. It shuts down, the bios shows up, loads, then the windows boot loader begins loading and suddenly the progress ring halts and nothing happens anymore (I have tested it for several hours). While this is not really a problem usually (If a service attempts to initiate a restart I just pull the power after saving everything) with windows 10 it became a problem. A while ago obviously a new build was released and it tried to install said build. This is done using an initiated restart. The restart happens, it hangs in the boot loader and when I reset the machine I get the usual "Your windows has been reverted to an earlier version" message. So far so good. The problem is that since then every day this happens. It randomly asks me if I want to apply the update now, I obviously dont want it to, and set it to remind me again in 8 hours. I dont know what insane person had the idea that a forced shutdown that kills every living thing on your computer was the appropriate action for something as utterly unimportant as an update but sadly after these 8 hours it does exactly that.   After loosing a several gb download and a very long compilation has been corrupted I'm now ready to do everything to stop this madness. I first tried it the nice way and checked the update settings. Windows responds witht he following:   A note here: I am the system administrator, this is a home computer and I am on the only account there is. How do I get rid of this non-sense?   Next I tried to forcefully kill the entire update service. It seems it worked for regular updates, but the preview build update is something that is not covered by that. When I go to the settings for new build installations all I am able to change is the time new builds should be installed (if available). Is there a way to completely disable that?  So to summarize: Is there a way to prevent windows from performing any action if there are updates? Or disable updates completely? Making everything manual? In the end the updates have destroyed more on my computer than they have prevented.
29788
Throughout the day I notice that my computer makes apparently random device-connect and/or device-disconnect ("boink") sounds.    I suppose it is the same sound you hear when connecting or disconnecting a USB device such as a thumb drive.  I've noticed that this happens on each of three computers I work with at home, my wife's computer, and my machine at work.  It happens without any user action at all - i.e. I'll be just sitting there (hands off my mouse and keyboard), and the computer will make the sound.  There is no visual queue or anything.  Just the sound.  I have sometimes gone in pursuit of the sound - running virus scans, examining event logs and such, and observing task manager - but have never had any luck tracking this thing down, but have not had any luck.  I've been noticing this since Windows Vista and now the sounds have followed me through to Windows 7.   Surely someone else out there must be experiencing this and can explain what is happening.
86496
I was not able to boot in safe mode on my Windows 7 PC, so I went into boot manager and checked off boot into safe mode to see if that would fix the issue. Unfortunately it did not, and now my PC seems only to be able to keep trying to boot into safe-mode. Is there a way to set it back to regular normal boot from outside of Windows?
87386
My computer doesn't boot. I format my Toshiba laptop with a bootable USB drive. I make this , and when i restart the computer after the installation, my computer does not boot. Then i run boot-repair and finishes with this . I reboot ant nothing happens. I review some questions before, but could't find anything yet. Can someone help me please?
112787
About 1/3 of the time that I boot my laptop, I get an error message that says  Error: Malformed file. Press any key to continue...   I press a key, and then my computer boots up and I can't discern any negative effects.  It's kind of disconcerting, and does delay the boot process.  How do I resolve this error and ensure my system is stable?
54973
Hope you can help me, 'cause this problem really made me sick already.  Hardware: Asus X555SJ (Dualcore Intel celeron 2166MHz, GeForce GT920 1GB, RAM 4GB) Systems: Windows 10 LTSB x64, Ubuntu 16.04.1 i386.  Here's the problem: when i try to reboot ubuntu, i see the ubuntu logo, then the screen gets black, and that's all that happens. The notebook still works and never turns off. When i'm shutting down ubuntu, i see the ubuntu logo on screen, but the screen doesn't fade out, i can observe the logo for hours and nothing happens either. In both cases I have to poweroff the notebook with a button. I've read couple of articles, tried to sudo shutdown, sudo reboot, but it didn't help. The problem still remains. Any ideas? Some people suggest to do sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get upgrade, tried that too. Failed. All the updates/upgrades install correctly but it doesn't solve the problem. Any help will be useful!  ps. sorry if it's hard to read, may be mistakes, i'm not a native englishspeaker and writer =)
20433
I am having a problem with Windows 7. When I boot up, the CPU jumps to 100% execution for about 10-15 minutes. During this time, it is really slow, and if I play any music, the songs play slowly and sound distorted.  I tried to scan my computer with different antivirus programs, I used Spybot, HijackThis, and CCleaner, but I didn’t find anything of note.  I watched the process list in Task Manager and saw that there are two processes that are to blame. There are two copies of svchost.exe, one using ~48% CPU, the second (under the Network Service account) using ~37%. For the first 15 minutes, the CPU runs at about 70-80%, then eventually drops to 30-40%.  I don’t know what to do. I could not find a way to stop the services, and if I try to kill them, sometimes the system crashes.
84568
For the past couple weeks, my PC has started having an issue where it randomly reboots. These reboots have happen 1-2 times a day, and have so far always been when I am away from it.  There isn't any discernible patterns I've seen from the reboot timestamps. I've thought it might be related to the power supply going bad, but it is fairly new. Also the fact that it is not rebooting under load, but rather while Idle, seems like it shouldn't be a PSU problem?  I also upgraded to Windows 10 the other day, expecting that to possibly affect/fix the issue, but it still happens regardless.  Here are the two events always generated by the reboot -        Is there any way to further debug/troubleshoot what exactly is causing the reboots?
82465
Is it possible for my Linux box to become infected with a malware?  I haven't heard of it happening to anyone I know, and I've heard quite a few times that it isn't possible. Is that true?  If so, what's up with Linux Anti-Virus (security) software?
50988
After running a VM and logging out, I got a black screen. I powered off and re-started but got the same after the bios option in start up passed. Several attempts went bye with the same result. So I fiddled with bios boot options a bit and was able to get to a different looking Ubuntu start up screen which, after entering pass key would run a series of commands that were too numerous and frantic to make out. They appeared to be overlapped/layered (the text that is) and seemingly repeating endlessly. I had to power down to get it to stop and re-booting just had the same effect. Finally, I hit the down arrow key when prompted for "disk sda5_crypt" at the pseudo Ubuntu log-in screen I mentioned before. This brought me to an all black screen which read something like:  lvmetad not active cannot process volume group "umbuntu-vg" unlock disk sda5_crypt**   From here I entered a password and Ubuntu start up ran.  That was an unsettling hour or so and I'd like to avoid that in the future. Any ideas what caused it and how to avoid it going forward?  Should have said this before but Ubuntu is the only OS on my machine and my optical drive cannot be opened manually.
32244
My computer reboots, seemingly completely at random, about once every week to two weeks but has occasionally gone months. It just goes from running fine to the POST with no error messages or anything and doesn't seem to be due to heat or usage as it's happened a couple of times when the computer has booted just a few moments ago and is idling. It's been happening for as long as I've had this computer, almost two years. It's happened in both Vista and Windows7.  I strongly suspect it's a hardware problem. But due to the rareish and random nature of the crashes my normal strategy of just removing hardware until the problem stops isn't really practical. My guess would be Power Supply, Ram, or Motherboard. But I just don't know how to test an issue this random and want to figure out how to confirm which it is before I go replacing things. So is there some software or hardware that can be used to test these sorts of errors? I did run memtest86 for about 8 hours without finding any issues. And the power supply is more than capable of running my system.
8656
I have noticed that from some time my system is freezing and its probably caused by the high CPU usage which is caused by the system process.  All applications I'm running is the Skype, TeamSpeak and Chrome so it definitely shouldnt eat that amount of CPU.  You can see the problem itself and running processes in the screenshot below:    Sometimes CPU usage is reaching 90%, but the average usage is like 40-65%.  My PC parameters:   Windows 8 (customer preview) Intel Core i3 - 2350M 8 GB RAM   I'd appreciate any help attempt! Regards.  --UPDATE--  As the user below posted a great answer, I have noticed that the process that is eating the most CPU in the system is called Arthurx.sys, simple google tells that it's a TPLink driver (an wifi adapter, I have bought like 2 weeks ago!) drivers has been installed from the Windows MSDN, but also tried to install the drivers from the attached CD, but it doesn't help. From the system start, it is using like 5% of the CPU only, but after 2-4 hours of working it is growing up and reaching 40-60% of the CPU usage.  Device name: TPLink WN722N
31002
I have run two virus scans and neither of them have found anything so far (Malware Bytes and Avira Rescue). During gaming I will get Windows popups saying that my system is low of memory and recommends closing the game. This can also happen while browsing. My computer seems to become sluggish a lot and will hang up often, such as when clicking a link from a messenger program to open in my browser.   I am unsure what is causing this. My memory usage on the processes tab doesn't add up to such a high percentage of my actual memory.    As a side note, is my Disk Usage supposed to spike up to 100% sometimes? Research seems to say so.
10184
Today I got what I presume was the update that should take care of Spectre and Meltdown. That didn't go very well. What do I do now? See screen photo.    I can't boot the 4.4.0-108-generic kernel because of a kernel panic. I'm running 16.04 on an Intel Core i5-4670K CPU @ 3.40GHz × 4.
53221
When I start my PC, my computer plays a loud BEEP for 2 seconds and after that it starts abnormally like press F1 To Start. I found some video in that many of the video tells to clean the RAM. After that I clean my RAM but it's not working.  So please tell how I get rid ofthis BEEP sound of CPU.
74647
I have a Microsoft LifeCam HD sitting atop my monitor.  Today, completely out of the blue, its light came on -- I was simply browsing the web (in Chrome) when it happened.  After about 5 minutes the webcam turned off.  Naturally, I immediately suspected my ex-wife (when in doubt, I always suspect her), but she isn't computer savvy enough.  I looked over the process list and didn't see anything suspicious.  I am running a couple of open source projects and free apps (e.g., greenshot, powermenu, supertray), but I've had them for years.  Autoruns reports nothing suspicious in the startup and neither does Windows Defender.  Anyways, what could it be?  What should I look at next?