Realcent.org

Well yesterday on my home computer after I looked at a YouTube video about what might happen today with the markets. The next thing I see is a screen flash and the computer rebooting then a black screen with the curser flashing.

I am obsessively running three different full scans of my hard drive looking to viruses and malware ect. as well as have Microsoft Security Essentials but somehow still this rogue virus slipped in anyway. Now that computer is in the shop and hopefully my data can be saved and cleaned. It might take a few days to run all the scans and set me back $150. It sucks!

Sucks man - those things are vicous. Knock on wood - I had one (or more) a year ago that took me a month to rid of, and ever since I've been relentless in running multi-scans of the latest every day and paid out for a real-time anti-malware tool which has protected my butt a number of times.

You sure it's a virus?

My laptop did the same thing a few months back, and it was the motherboard that went kapoots.

I concur. It sounds like hardware.

Hard drive crash could do it... from experience.

If it was a virus it would still (somewhat) boot, even if the hard drive fail the BIOS would show a "Operating System Not Found" kind of error message.
If you see a cursor flashing the video card is powered, that leave pretty much only the motherboard or a damaged BIOS that fail. When the CPU fail or memory, the motherboard are still able to make Beep to signal the error. Some virus may be able to erase or damage a flashable BIOS since software do it, but i never saw that.
Probably going to cost more than $150
sorry