Virus Scan Shutting down laptop

[morganlefay]

I had a machine once that would crash on a virus scan...

Ended up being bad memory.

Wasnt there a worm that shut down machines..??

Off to google


MLF

http://www.pchell.com/virus/sasser.shtml

[nihil]

Hmmm,

Yes, a virus scan might be fairly intensive, but it would be rather unusual for it to trigger a shutdown at a particular point in a particular program. However I must give credit to MLF for coming up with that one as it links two possibilities with a single cause?

Say we have a very large file and it is complex(compressed). If the file was corrupt in a certain way it might crash the system, because although modern AV systems generally skip corrupted files, this one would need unpacking first and that is the bit that crashes.

Now, say there is nothing wrong with the file, but it is large and complex? that will put a much heavier demand on RAM and possibly engage corrupted portions of it. In either case the common denominator would be the file.

It might be worth running Memtest86 to test the RAM.