Possible virus

A friend of mine just called telling me that she was trying to play a cd rom game. The game is called Demolition Racer (not a gamer...so not sure what this game does). She is running Windows 98 and has an HP emachine(???). Her PC locked up and she rebooted. When she rebooted her colors were all messed up on her desktop (her wallpaper is a puppy. Said that you can see the outline of the puppy, but the colors are mainly red, green,and blue. No icons appear on her desktop. She also said that her boyfriend loaded the same game on his machine and it had a similar effect except he still has access to stuff. He checked his desktop settings for the color settings, the only two options he had were 16 color and 2 color. He said he had High color (16 bit) and something else before using the game.
Now, after all that ...I have 2 questions...1)does anyone know of a virus within this game? and 2) if my friends computer is dead, is their a way I can pull her files from DOS?
I have heard there is a way to do it from DOS, but am not sure how.
Once again...thanks in advance for your help!

 

Hi,

The best thing to do, is to have your computer scanned on line for viruses:
<A HREF="http://housecall.antivirus.com/">Trend Micro HouseCall </A>

<A HREF="http://security2.norton.com/us/home.asp?j=1&venid=sym&langid=us&plfid=20&pkj=RBCQKZWCGZYFVHDYKDB">Symantec Security Check</A>

In reality, the very best thing would have been to have a good antivirus installed....


Good luck,

 

I have the Game, never noticed a problem, probably a Video problem, can she start in safe mode ? Try holding ctrl while she starts, or tap f8 on a Compaq, if she can , post back and we will go from there..Rhett

 

I doub't the symptoms are the result of a virus, but that's not to say if no updated antivirus program has been regularly run, there aren't any present.

To get the display back I would try this:

>> go to start>shutdown>restart in MS-DOS mode. (Or boot to a command prompt by pressing and holding the ctrl key until the Boot Menu appears -- and choose the command prompt option)

>> at the prompt enter:

scanreg /restore

select a started registry from one of the 4 visible which predates the problem.

 

Thanks guys! I will try it all. She is bringing in her computer to me Thursday. If I am able to get anything the first thing I am going to do is put an antivirus software on there.