[intmarkworkk]

My sister has a 2002 Compaq Presario 6000 Series. Yesterday afternoon, it started displaying all of these weird codes on the startup screen (think The Matrix) and took a very long time to process information. I thought maybe it was because she was using it a lot that day and that it needed a "break," so I told her to turn it off for a little while. However, later that afternoon, I would turn it on and while it was starting up, it started making a "ticking" noise. I just shut it off and decided that I would figure out what's wrong the next day.
Well, my mom and sister wake me up this morning and tells me that her computer is still acting weird. This time, it starts up and loads normally and then restarts again. This process continues, so the computer cannot be used. I asked my mom and sister if they did anything recently that would have triggered these problems. My mom said she opened an e-mail last week with a BS name, so I immediately linked it to that because there are a lot of e-mail viruses going around that contain attachments that destroy your computer. I went online and did some research and diagnosed the problem. I followed the instructions given, but it wouldn't work.
So my question is, does anyone know of these e-mail computer viruses, what they do, where I can receive more information about them, and how to fix them? Any help would be much appreciated. However, if no one has an idea, that means we're one step closer to replacing this XP-running-POS to a much more functional Mac