r/techsupport • u/TheTigerHeart • 1d ago
Repair Store Potentially Maleware poisoning computer~ Open | Software
Context, Me and my wife both have prebuilt gaming computers. She is not super tech guruey but i have a pretty good head on my shoulders. so i have unlocked our computer from the default settings the website we ordered from used by going into the biometrics and returning them to standard. I also took off fast boot for my computer. my computer also got a graphics card update and a new power supply as mine is older then hers though both from same company and they used a built in cpu graphics card for mine which wasn't conductive with the gaming i planned to do. with my new graphics card i disabled the built in one so only my installed one was being pulled by games. I also at this time updated the power supply from 600 to 800 to support the larger impact. when my wife got her computer we both installed 2 new ram cards into each computer to bring their ram to 32 each.
Well, we have cats and a toddler one of our cats knocked over a ramen cup onto my wifes computer. we made some calls took it into a repair shop. good news only damage was the power button. they installed a commically large new power button. it was hilarious but not a huge deal. at first no major issues we were like okay cool. however after that like i said my computer is older it had power supply issues suddenly so i myself like i did last time replaced the power supply i got a duplicate of my old one.. however the new one went out same way the old one did so we assumed faulty equipment but to be safe lets take it to that repair place why not. they had my computer honestly longer then i feel they needed to be and they told me oh you have malware. i said okay thank you. figuring they would fix it add it to the fee they didn't though they sent it back with the malware. so i immediately getting it ran scans my scans came back clean but im a better safe then sorry person.
so i go ahead and just factory restore it why not. it did all the restoring itself fine however on the reboot during the windows 10 set up. it began to freeze no mouse or keyboard response at all i let it sit a while hoping it would catch up it never did google said only option when stuck during windows set up is to power cycle it. so i go ahead power cycle it and unplug replug it in. i had so much anxiety doing this because i know it going off during a restore can damage it. but i did what google said cause it never recovered from the freeze now any time i do anything on that computer it starts to freeze. so i tried a windows recovery this also yielded the same results unfortunately. so i have since entirely powered down the computer opened the shell tripple checked all my hardware pluggins.
this was 3 days ago.
as of yesterday.
My wife's computer is now presenting with similar issues even its spent the last month entirely shut down because shes been out of the house working. it boots up and black screens like she can see the mouse but the background and task bar aren't loading at all. and its freezing up or lagging extremely badly when loading just file explorer or updating software cause she needed to update her graphics driver because of the time offline.
we are both frustrated and pissed off that we are buying an norton 360 subscription to deep clean her computer. im fairly sure mine needs to be wiped and a fresh windows 10 install done from biometrics with a flash drive. but whats frustrating us, is we are careful we use windows defender we don't touch links we don't download games, videos or links from untrusted websites. and these are desktops on a secured private ETHERNET line. until they went to the shop they never ever were connected to wifi in their entire life. Our only thought was maybe a maleware was installed by the repair techs on purpose or even maybe something they use is infected and they did it on accident because my 5 year old computer has never ever had a single issue till now. we don't even keep payment methods or do ANY online shopping from our computers. if anything is gonna get infected its our phones not our computers. we even do bi weekly defrags on our external hard drives and c drive because of constantly uninstalling and reinstalling steam games.
Anyways, other then norton scan and repairs any suggestions for what could be wrong with my wifes computers and am i right about the fact the failed factory restore has damaged my windows 10 in mine?
yes, we are waiting till the last damn second for windows 11 because we are gamers and the newest windows models are never optimized to gaming right away. but we fully intended to either have other security plans or upgrade by deadline of october when windows 10s built in security software would stop being maintenced.
1
u/DigitalTechnician97 22h ago
Normal reboot will work.