Computer not booting and phone line problems

[kasavien]

Hi All

I have been looking at my dads computer this weekend as it had stopped booting, i.e. it had stopped even posting. The spec is as follows

Athlon XP 2600+ CPU
Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe Motherboard
9600XT Graphics Card
1Gb Corsair Value Select PC2700

It's a long story but i've got it working again, which involved swapping memory modules, and resetting CMOS etc, all the usual. I've run memtest86 for 5 full passes (about 2 & 3/4 hours) and that reported no errors, i couldn't really test for longer since i'm going back to uni in half an hour i'll post a screenshot of memtest when i get back to uni.

The problem is that sometimes when you turn the computer on and the phoneline is connected, if you pick up a telephone receiver on the same line the line will be dead with no dial tone, if you unplug the phone line from the computer and plug it back in there is then a dialtone (my dad uses a 56K PCI modem and dialup to access the internet). This led me to believe that there may be a dialer virus on the computer, but scans with avast bring up nothing, i tried to do a virus scan with trend micro's housecall but couldn't get that to work. Anyway that said i couldn't see any out of the ordinary processes running although there were some unnecessary ones. I ran msconfig to get rid of the unnecessary ones like the hp ones and there's a screen shot of the current processes and msconfig below, which shows the processes i have deselected to run at startup. The odd thing was that when i first ran msconfig there was a tick box with nothing next to it, i deselected this and restarted and this has now disappeared.



So having said all that does anyone have any other ideas to better test if there is a virus present?

Also the main reason for messing around with the computer was that it would hang on startup, before the virus scanner was able to load or anything else for that matter, but this was always intermittent at best and as i've said above i ran memtest which showed no errors, if anyone has any thoughts on this they would be much appreciated.

Thanks in anticipation

Andy

[Clunk]

Spybot might be worth a try mate

[kasavien]

yeh good idea, will have to wait till christmas now tho, i'm back at uni, for now just as a precaution i've told my dad to keep the phoneline unplugged when not on the internet, trying to get him onto broadband, but that may take a while. Just out of interest does everything look ok in msconfig, i haven't unchecked anything i shouldn't have, have I? or are there any more unnecessary processes?

Thanks for the help

Andy

[ukengineer]

It sounds like the modem is knackered.

[kasavien]

The modem is relatively new (less than a year old), and still works when plugged in