Virus? Multiple issues that follow several different phones

[lunatic59]

I looked up the official Samsung OEM parts and they all seem to have the same 5.0V 0.7A output spec. While the 1A output is above what the Samsung products deliver, it's pretty standard for aftermarket chargers. What the increased amperage will do is cause the battery to charge faster and as a result, get hotter. Heat can damage sensitive electronics, but I would be surprised if it was hot enough to damage the phone.

If you are that concerned, then it's probably best not to use it. You can charge it through a USB port connected to your PC. USB ports deliver 5V and .5A. It might take a little longer to charge, but you'll be well under the specified amperage.

 

[skosha]

At this point I think I need a new battery too. I found a samsung charger that meets the exact specs and when I plug in the phone, the battery pic comes up and then a triangle with an exclamation point shows up and the phone does not charge. I swear this is God's test of my patience.

 

[lunatic59]

Ah. Well, a faulty charger could have fried the battery, or the battery could have been the root cause of your problems. I think at this point it might be prudent to walk into an AT&T store and see if they can pop a different battery in the phone to charge it and then make sure the thing works with your new number etc.

 

[skosha]

The battery cannot have been the root cause as it's happened now in some form with 6 or 7 different phones. I still think I have a virus or something wrong with my computer and each phone has probably been plugged into it at some point so maybe the problem stems from plugging into my computer USB? I will try to stop into an ATT store later today to get a working battery, but I still need to figure out what caused this or it will just happen again

 

[skosha]

I haven't plugged it into the computer at all recently, but I can say the problems started occurring around the one time that I did

 

[EarlyMon]

I looked up the official Samsung OEM parts and they all seem to have the same 5.0V 0.7A output spec. While the 1A output is above what the Samsung products deliver, it's pretty standard for aftermarket chargers. What the increased amperage will do is cause the battery to charge faster and as a result, get hotter. Heat can damage sensitive electronics, but I would be surprised if it was hot enough to damage the phone.

If you are that concerned, then it's probably best not to use it. You can charge it through a USB port connected to your PC. USB ports deliver 5V and .5A. It might take a little longer to charge, but you'll be well under the specified amperage.

Great points.

I would like to chime in on some common misunderstandings though.

Voltage is forced, current is drawn as needed. A 120 watt light bulb draws 1 amp, but isn't damaged being the only thing on a typical 15 amp circuit.

Heating from aftermarket chargers would be caused by them being out of spec for voltage. The USB voltage spec gives a range, or window if you will. Many chargers have been mentioned hereabouts that our members have tested and found to be way out of line. I think that the highest I remember reading about was above 7 volts.

Another cause of heating while charging would be one or more runaway processes on the phone while charging. The phone always runs off of the battery, not the charger, as a safety feature. If this is happening, shut down or reboot the phone and monitor it.

Finally, overheating while charging could be caused by a faulty charging circuit on the phone or a bad battery. If your phone gets hot charging while turned off, and it never used to, stop! You have a fire hazard.

It's reasonable for a phone that can draw up to an amp to get warmer when charging on one amp vs 0.5 amp. The more power you draw, the more heat you'll dissipate (think light bulbs). But it's not ok to get hot.

Hope this helps!

PS - I use a 2 amp charger with multiple ports. Both my wife's phone and mine can charge at the same time, each drawing 1 amp. Also, either of can charge just our phones alone without overheating the phone or the charger, because it's a better unit and its voltage is dead on.

(And for any cringing, yeah, I used the slang amp for ampere, sorry. )

 

[skosha]

Thanks for the schooling on charging! I will be much more careful in the future.

Back to more problems unfortunately

I received the new device, got the new battery, and it works. I haven't plugged it into a charger or USB port or anything at this point. I enter in my new gmail account and the first thing I did was google search. It still says this...


We're sorry...
...but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now. See Google Help for more information.

Google help makes no mention of phones and only goes through the steps of searching for viruses, etc. on your computer.

What the F!!? Do I need a new SIM card now too?? This is beyond annoying!

 

[lunatic59]

Are you connecting via wifi or mobile data? If it happens on both then I'd say it has something to do with your Google account, if you get that error on one but not the other then it's network specific and has nothing to do with your phone. It could be that another device on that subnet does indeed have a malware intrusion that is causing what Google perceives to be a DOS attack and has blacklisted it from their servers.

You could also try to install Bing search to see if the block is at Google or through your carrier/isp.

 

[skosha]

I was connecting via mobile data. I just connected via wifi and works perfect. "'It could be that another device on that subnet does indeed have a malware intrusion that is causing what Google perceives to be a DOS attack and has blacklisted it from their servers."......say what??

Sorry...I have no idea what that means or how I get it to go away!

Furthermore, as a little experiment, I performed a factory reset on the new phone and got the same message "can't access to '/system/csc/ATT/system"

 

[lunatic59]

Sorry for the "geek-speak". Basically what it means is that Google (or AT&T) has detected what it perceives to be an excessive amount of traffic either from your device or the network your phone is on, so they blocked it in case it was a DOS (denial of service) attack. This summer the huge domain hosting company godaddy was shut down by a denial of service attack. Simply stated they (the bad guys) set up a whole lot of computers to send automated requests to the servers until no one else can get through making it look like they are offline.

Since wifi worked but mobile data didn't I'd have to think that this is coming from AT&T. Give them a call, or walk it into the AT&T store and show them.

Don't worry about not being able to access the /system/csc/ATT/system directory, it's where AT&T keeps their pre-installed apps and they lock it down so normal users can't get rid of them. That's normal.

 

[skosha]

I seriously might be the first person to commit suicide over an andriod phone. Thats not funny, I know it. I am so f'ing frustrated that I am really freaking out Once again another andriod has failed me. There is no reasonable explaination for this. If you read above you will hear about my reoccuring problems on like my 10th android phone. I have charged this specific phone only with one home charger made specifically for my phone and very, very seldom on a universal car charger that I just bought. I transfered only my 400 songs to a new SD card. I created a new gmail account. After a couple weeks with no issues I logged into my FB account (after changing the password) and stared using my yahoo mail app. Note that the last two times I have changed my FB password it said the change was unsuccessful when it was successful). Again the FB widget started going blank and buttons to scroll through the news feed and connect to the full facebook app started working off and on. Finally I deleted the widget and have just been using a shortcut to the facebook app. Earlier today, I was trying to respond to a text message by saying "Yes". Everytime I got to the "e" on my physical keyboard it took me to the page to configure a new email account. I hit "back" and I'm back in the text message. I type "Y", it works. I type "e" I get sent to set up a new email account again. Worked fine on the touch screen though. I exited out of the text application then it worked again like normal. Seems like a small issue until you realize that the same, if not very similar keyboard problem has happen on a dozen phones! Right now, just like the last phone, there is an exclamation point over my battery symbol and it will not charge. I have had probem connecting to the internet since my last post. After I connected to wifi, google stopped saying that I was sending automated queries, however, now many websites says data connectivity problem 500: Internal Server Error 3 or 4 times before connecting. I keep hitting OK then it will finally go to the website but have extra large page margins that I have to scroll through to see the actual website. I just now finally got my phone to charge to 2%, enough to send a text message, after an hour of trying on the car charger and then my house charger. What could possibly be causing these issues? I plan to try to go into and ATT store tomorrow but I have spent so many hours on the phone with advanced tech support that I have little faith. I even reformatted my computer out of paranoia that my issues were generate from it somehow and have not hooked up my phone to my computer at all. I used an SD card adapter to transfer the music to my new SD card and went through all my music deleting anything but standard MP3 files. What would you do if you were me?