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I heard a rumor back in the day that the Chernobyl virus [1] (Also Win.CIH, I think) was released by Microsoft within pirated versions of Windows. At the time I was in high school and just believed it, because Microsoft was the big, evil corporation at the time. Now of course I'm more skeptical, though I still wouldn't be surprised.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIH_(computer_virus)

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Thanks for reminding me of that one.

Some bogus design decisions by Packard Bell (no jumper/switch to lock out BIOS flash access) meant two of my machines were written off.

No, they weren't running pirated Windows, though I was on day 204 of my 31 day Paint Shop Pro evaluation.

A friend of mine had a pbell that was killed off by Chernobyl. I was on the phone with him when he booted it up. "I'm going to boot." "Don't do it man." "Nah I'm gonna boot. Here it goes. See it's fine." "Sweet" "Uh oh" "Uh oh?" "Uh oh"

And that was the end of that machine lol

I managed to get replacement motherboards for both under warranty, including engineer call out.

You'd almost think the virus shipped with the computer, the way they responded.

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