When is a Virus Not a Virus?

Saturday, November 12, 2011

When it’s not!

I make no apologies for the setup shown in the photograph.

That’s my “Big Beige Box”, used to be my main system, now serves me as a printer server and more importantly, plays music 24/7. The music is piped through the Noresco Quadraphonic amplifier and thence to most rooms in my home.

The Panasonic mobile phone is one of three I collected from the recycle bin; it works better than the set I paid money for at Zellers!

Over the past few days, some sort of virus has hit the BBB and not until this morning did I track it down.

I should state that I am beyond-paranoid about infections, with one memory-resident package and two on-demand packages checking my systems.

I don’t do any web browsing or email on the BBB; it just plays music through WinAmp, so I’ve been in a mild state of shock when the WinAmp program emits “Fur Elise” repeatedly.

I switch to the BBB and shut down WinAmp, thinking it has a bug of some sort, but “Fur Elise” continues as strident as ever.

I fire up Task Manager with Ctrl-Alt-Del and search running tasks; no sign of anything malign.

Then “Fur Elise” stops, so something I’ve nudged has frightened the virus into silence.

Darn thing started up again this morning at 7:00 a.m..

In desperation I shut down the BBB with the reset button on the front panel. Axed it dead. No Power. Powerless.

“Fur Elise” continued!

How can a computer play music once the power is off?

This must be some sort of weird virus in my Sound Card? No.

The Panasonic mobile phone has an alarm set for 7:00 a.m.

It plays “Fur Elise” repeatedly, then stops after one minute.

Phew!

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