britechguy
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 4,057
- Location
- Staunton, VA
I have a "sudden incident" on my primary laptop that is unlike anything I've ever experienced. I'll preface this with:
1. I have not clicked through on any strange links.
2. I have had no strange, unaccounted for pop-ups.
3. The only thing "unusual" I did this evening was to connect an external USB number pad to test it out. No software or drivers involved.
As I was tooling along, as per usual, suddenly UAC started asking, repeatedly, whether I wanted to allow Brave to make changes to my machine. Initially I though I'd accidentally triggered something, but it became quickly apparent this wasn't the case. When I went to start MS-Word UAC threw the same behavior.
So, I thought, let's do a hard shutdown with the power button and see if things return to normal when I reboot. They didn't.
Then, I thought, this has to be an exotic infection of some kind, so I'll trigger an offline Windows Defender scan. It found nothing.
Everything is still hosed, with myriad oddities. One thing I noticed is that when the Win10 lock screen comes up it does not ever do the bits of white text asking, "Do you like what you see?" at the upper right, the location and temperature on the lower left, etc. This always pops up if I let the machine wait a few seconds after it initially shows, but it's not doing it now.
I take regular full system image backups, so I can recover using one. But I am wondering if the symptoms ring any sort of bell for anyone. I really don't believe that my almost brand new Crucial SSD could be crashing and burning this quickly, but maybe it is.
If any of this seems familiar to anyone, and you've got some theory as to root cause, I'd love to hear it. I'd also love to know if recovering the system from my most recent backup will rectify things (I'll try that, anyway, just to see, but . . .)
It's handy to have a backup machine that, while not exactly the same environment as the primary, is close enough to make it an easy switch in a pinch like this one.
1. I have not clicked through on any strange links.
2. I have had no strange, unaccounted for pop-ups.
3. The only thing "unusual" I did this evening was to connect an external USB number pad to test it out. No software or drivers involved.
As I was tooling along, as per usual, suddenly UAC started asking, repeatedly, whether I wanted to allow Brave to make changes to my machine. Initially I though I'd accidentally triggered something, but it became quickly apparent this wasn't the case. When I went to start MS-Word UAC threw the same behavior.
So, I thought, let's do a hard shutdown with the power button and see if things return to normal when I reboot. They didn't.
Then, I thought, this has to be an exotic infection of some kind, so I'll trigger an offline Windows Defender scan. It found nothing.
Everything is still hosed, with myriad oddities. One thing I noticed is that when the Win10 lock screen comes up it does not ever do the bits of white text asking, "Do you like what you see?" at the upper right, the location and temperature on the lower left, etc. This always pops up if I let the machine wait a few seconds after it initially shows, but it's not doing it now.
I take regular full system image backups, so I can recover using one. But I am wondering if the symptoms ring any sort of bell for anyone. I really don't believe that my almost brand new Crucial SSD could be crashing and burning this quickly, but maybe it is.
If any of this seems familiar to anyone, and you've got some theory as to root cause, I'd love to hear it. I'd also love to know if recovering the system from my most recent backup will rectify things (I'll try that, anyway, just to see, but . . .)
It's handy to have a backup machine that, while not exactly the same environment as the primary, is close enough to make it an easy switch in a pinch like this one.
L
