Afriend of mine asked me if someone in chat could really " FRY" her computer. I can understand where they may be able to hack a virus or do file damage through the internet but can they actually damage components beyond what a recovery CD won't fix.... Thanks

not really. The biggest danger is getting a "backdoor" or "trojan" from another user. these programs allow a hacker/script kiddie to do just about anything. uploading a virus,remote manipulation of the victims computer,participating in a DOS (denial of service attack)etc,etc. Frying a computer usually denotes damage of a sort to the hardware itself and is next to impossible.Even a local user(sitting in front of that computer)would find it extremely difficult to damage the hardware without using a hammer. ;-) although reloading an OS and drivers is STILL a pain in the ***. C0K3

There are viruses out there that can 'flash' the bios with garbage. Then you may or may not be able to reflash the bios back to it's original self.

Maybe fry wasn't the right word to use. Someone privately messaged my son while he was in a chat room. After they said hi, they said: ha, I got your box open now I can attack you. Don't shut your computer down cuz it will do a slow meltdown. He forgot to tell me and I rebooted cuz it wasn't working right. Took 15 hours to get an operating system back in it. And I mean 15 hours on non-stop trying. Good thing too. When I did get back in I found 2 regenerating files in my windows folder they were: mplayer2.file=188 of these files tuneup.file=408 of these files If I had left the computer run it would of eaten up the hard drive space until there was no room to install windows. This was a viurs that was so bad it was hidden from windows and dos mode. I was in dos trying to reinstall windows from the cd and the black screen kept saying: you have a true type font application running. close this application to stop the errors. How did I have an application running? There was no windows. I call it a true type font virus. And the guy never send my son anything. Just typed words into the box and clicked on send and I almost lost my hard drive over it. Fry can be taken many ways to a computer user also. I fried a hard drive last night. I knew it had over 90,000 bytes of bad sectors on a 10G hard drive but we were going to wait a month to replace it. Well I was downloading drivers to it last night and all of a sudden I got a blue screen error that said: unable to write to D drive. And also got more than a few: general faul protection errors. please run windows setup again. So just about any thing is possible with computers. Just be a little more specific when posting. Oh and incidentally, I have heard of people passing viruses through email and messengers that do actually melt down your cpu or ram and other M/B chips. So like I said you can never be too careful.