Virus Warnings and other questions for you - HELP

So, for the past week or two I have been un able to power up my G5 tower until yesterday morning. I believe it has to have something to do with a power outage that happened in my neighborhood a few weeks ago and it never shut down correctly. Anyhow, I would plug the power back into the tower and the power light would come on but nothing. Do any of you have any explainations of why this could of happened?

Secondly, since the computer has been up and running it has been running perfectly with no problems, but I continuously receive messages telling me "your computer is running at half its normal speed. You might be infected with a virus, adware, spyware ect." And it then asks me to go through a virus scan and tells me there is infected data on my computer, but logically I don't have any viral scan software on my computer this is all just coming through Safari. Is my safari infected with something that might infect the rest of my computer? please keep me updated with what you think could be the problem. I have had this computer for almost 4 years. I don't have a single audio file, picture, or movie file on it everything is backed up onto externals so, the only things I have on my hard drive is the software to run these initial files...

i'm lost here.

thanks

Marcus

Hi Marcus - firstly, there's most unlikely to be a 'virus' on your Mac. The website you're visiting with Safari is trying to trick you into using its software, probably designed for Windows, to gain access to sensitive files on your computer. Only you can allow that, thanks to the MacOS firewall, which you need to set to as much security as reasonable.

It's very important not to be taken in by the flashing sign "your computer may be infected with blah-blah-blah, run our *free* virus scan software now!" If it a genuine Mac trojan, and there are a few of them about (eg. the DNSTrojan), you would need to allow it to get into the MacOS by giving your password. NEVER do that.

Last - if you know the name of the this 'virus' you mention, and where it may be coming from, you can check its authenticity with a Google search.

To the first part of your post - the power supply. Why you would lose the startup power for a while, and then have it begin working again, is a mystery. Have you reset the PRAM? You may need to reset the PMU as well. Check this and other forums, also Google, for how to do both those things if you don't already know.

but I continuously receive messages telling me "your computer is running at half its normal speed. You might be infected with a virus, adware, spyware ect."

Click to expand...

Where and when do you get these messages?

To the first part of your post - the power supply. Why you would lose the startup power for a while, and then have it begin working again, is a mystery. Have you reset the PRAM? You may need to reset the PMU as well. Check this and other forums, also Google, for how to do both those things if you don't already know.

Click to expand...

I have no idea how to do this but I will check it out soon.

but I continuously receive messages telling me "your computer is running at half its normal speed. You might be infected with a virus, adware, spyware ect."
Where and when do you get these messages?

Click to expand...

I got them randomly the other day. I wasn't doing anything specific. I never allowed anything to 'scan' so i believe I am alright so far.

They're just animations and can't do any harm. I suspect you've been to a couple of sites with popunders ie. a window that appears behind your browser and you only notice them later when you close a browser window.

Make sure you have pop ups blocked in your browser settings.

ooooops