my pc has been possessed by r2-d2: how do i kill the cute little devil?
 

Hi,
Thanks for reading this. My PC started beeping a few days ago. It's starting to do my head in now. It's multitone and intermittent.

It's coming from the pc speaker.
My PC is approx. 6 years old.
Recently deleted some files as advised by AdAware.
Winmx won't talk to me either(I can see and people can upload from me).
Running Windows 98SE, Outlook etc
Getting tons of SPAM

It doesn't start immediately and seems to stop when I'm not here working on the computer
I don't think it's only when I'm on Broadband but this is possible

Would really appreciate your help,

Ahh. This happened to my parents. What happened is that they got a trojan, and so they had a copy of mirc running that was hidden from the task manager in all ways. So all that would happen is that mirc would beep the speaker on certian events and it was really annoying.

Go out and get yourself a virus scanner, there is a free one that does a decent job at http://free.grisoft.com (for personal use only).

But if there was anything, that would be my bet.

their is also this one
http://www.clamwin.com/
I use clamav for samba/mail and it seems to get the job done

A great and free virus-checker program is Anti-Vir, personal edition. I've been running it on all my machines for several years and it has worked flawlessly. Highly recommended!

Anti-vir

Plus you may want to run spybot Search & destroy. I know you said you already ran ad-aware, but I've found each of those programs will miss something the other picked up. Running both covers most problems.

I hope this helps.

Hi,
Thanks for all the ideas. Rawb, I downloaded and ran your virus checker: it found 5 trojans so thankyou for that. I did have Norton too but can't remember when it last ran.

Trouble is it's still bleeping. I also put all the msn programs back where I thought they came from. And, I tried putting my Windows CD in, but nothing happened then. It's getting worse. Any more ideas??

When you ran the virus-checker, was the computer in safe mode? Many viruses, etc can load up during boot so it's too late once the computer starts. I had this problem once, so I
a) updated all the definitions of the virus-checker, anti-spyware, etc.
b) rebooted the computer in safe mode (hold down the ctrl button when the computer is starting up, then choose safe mode)
c) run all the checkers in safe mode.
d) reboot back into normal mode

This should help get rid of the more stubborn kind of problems