Asustek Computer recently admitted that some of its netbooks and nettops that were available on the Japanese market were infected with a virus. The company said it stopped sales and will provide necessary services to customers. The firm blamed an OEM contractor from China in the incident.

Asus has warned owners of Asus Eee Box nettop contained a virus file named “recycled.exe”. According to PC Advisor web-site, the virus is located on the Eee Box’s D drive. When it is opened, it begins copying itself to the main C drive and to any other removable drives or USB drives. Asustek also warns that external hard drives made by a third-party and supplied with Eee PC 701 SD-X may contain Troj_GameThie.Rz virus.

DigiTimes web-site quoted Asustek as saying that preliminary findings of its internal examination hint that the virus probably got onto the Eee Box personal computers via a USB drive used for system testing and inspection. The company reportedly said that affected systems were only made available in Japan.

On Wednesday Asustek reportedly revealed that a second-tier OEM in China was contracted to manufacture Eee Box systems for the Japan market, and it “was an error on the maker's part which led to the recent shipping of systems infected with a virus”. Asustek is reportedly considering transferring future Eee Box orders to Foxconn Electronics, Pegatron or other contract makers.

The reports about infected ultra low-cost personal computers that come with viruses pre-loaded because of improper quality control have all chances to affect their popularity among end-users, who would like to get inexpensive personal computers, but would hardly like to get problems along with a new system.

Tags: ASUS, Eee