Yes, I love Reboot, but this isn’t about the show.

At my last tech job I had an interesting situation. A woman brought in her laptop because, according to her, as soon as windows came up it would restart, then again and again. I asked her some of the normal things. Is it asking for safe mode, do you see your desktop, have you been downloading massive amounts of porn on it? No to the first and last, yes to the middle.

Finally I get it into the system and I boot it up. Comes into windows XP and all appears fine as windows begins loading up. Then the command prompt pops up and goes away, and everything proceeds to go into shut down mode. I watch as windows shuts down, the machine soft reboots, and windows begins to load again. I call my boss over to watch it. Finally we figure she has a virus.

I get permission from her, and do a clean up on it. A normal virus cleanup there took us about a half hour, we prided ourselves on speed. It also handled 95% of all virus issues. It did not fix this. I went to run some of the older tools, more specialized to see if they helped. Not a rootkit, nothing picking up in full scans on anything. Everytime it boots, the thing works right up until command prompt comes up.

Finally I begin checking the startup lists on the machine and find an odd shortcut named “mom”. Ok…. I open the file location and it links to a .bat file. Said .bat file had @echo off and then a command I didn’t recognize.

I deleted the file and lo and behold, the PC works. So I call the woman and when she picks it up explain what was going on then ask if she had a kid. She apparently grounded her son from using the computer because he kept watching porn on it. I guess he did this just to mess with her.

via: [Reddit\TalesFromTechSupport]