Sony VGN-sr290 laptop happens to be a very nice laptop, because of its medium size (not too big, not too small) it has decent -13.3 inch screen and happens to be a pretty fast little machine, good for office and travel. this particular model that customer brought in had 2GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive, all this running on windows 7 operating system.
if you are familiar with windows operating system, you may know that windows xp used to get blue screen of death (bsod) quite a bit. it used to be mainly because of driver issues and there is not much you could have done about it. With windows 7 you don’t get that very often. It tells me, microsoft has done quite some work to improve things and I congratulate them immensely! I think windows 7 is a brilliant operating system and I hope windows 8 will be even better!!!
that being said, this sony vgn-sr290 laptop was getting a blue screen on normal windows 7 start up and soon after that it would restart automatically. this is not the first time we see this. and there is a reason for it, but it is far from being drivers related.
the reason for the blue screen of death on this sony vaio vgn-sr290 laptop was rootkit infection. Rootkits are very dangerous virus. They are usually undetected by antivirus or even anti-malware softwares and hard to remove. this laptop was infected with rootkit.pihar.b virus and it actually prevents computer from booting up normally. so if you get a blue screen on windows 7 it is very likely that you have a rootkit virus in your system and you need to call overnight pc repair immediately!
we clean viruses like this , I wish I could say with no effort, but that wouldn’t be true. when computer has rootkit, there is very big chance it has many other infections. and this computer did also. At the end we cleaned it and it now runs perfectly!
and one advice for the future to all of you is: stop using internet explorer, use mozilla or chrome as your browsers and install free version of microsoft security essentials it is cost free and does the job just as good or better than the norton, eset, kaspersky that you will pay monthly fee for trust me.
