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Message: <blockquote data-quote="uguduwa" data-source="post: 2347224" data-attributes="member: 75642">There are some viruses that can damage the hard drive by turning  fast destroing it. Anothers can turn off the fans to made the cpu overheat.But most of the viruses afect the softwareIsnt there a way to change computers AC frequency which results in b00mComputers don't *use* AC power, therefore there *is* no frequency.  <img src="http://www.justlinux.com/forum/images/smilies/wink.gif" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />(Yes, AC gets fed into the power supply, but it gets stepped down to a manageable level (12V, 5V, or 3.3V), then rectified into DC, before it gets sent out to the rest of the components.)Some power supplies may allow you to change the frequency that they expect (60Hz vs. 50Hz) so they can work in countries other than the U.S., but this is done the same way as the 110V/220V switch -- it's a physical switch you have to change. It can smoke your PSU if you set it wrong, but it's not controlled by software *at* *all*.Now, if you mean overclocking, it *may* be possible to destroy some hardware using that, but most CPUs now shut down instead of smoking themselves. (Ever since that Tom's Hardware video of the Athlon going up in smoke after the heatsink was removed got released, AMD got serious about shutting the processor down when it was running out of spec.) I'm also not sure how much hardware allows you to change its frequency via software -- some nvidia cards do (although that's probably a driver thing). Most CPUs don't -- you have to go into your BIOS to change it.(And user code doesn't have write access to the BIOS -- heck, most of the time it doesn't have read access either.)Although no physical damage is done, some viruses have been known to overwrite system BIOS or information on hard drive controllers that basically render the hardware unusable unless reprogrammed. Chernobyl was the one that I remember the most that destroyed data on a hard drive or overwrote the BIOS. <a href="http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/cih.html" target="_blank">Chernobyl Virus</a></blockquote>

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