So as the title says AVAST has rendered my win xp (service pack 3) machine useless.
I went ahead and trusted it with a boot scan, with the option of “move ALL to chest” for any infected files it found.
That went okay, rebooted. Now the network/internet connectivity disappeared (I did a little research and suspected this was because AVAST moved the file ndis.sys into the chest, perhaps other needed files also), so all I did was restore that one file (to the folder windows/system32/drivers).
Then because I thought it might take a reboot to restore my network/internet connectivity I went ahead and rebooted, and boom the blue screen of death comes up at the first instance of the Windows XP load bar (this happens in all modes by the way).
So perhaps AVAST is definitely not a tool for beginners and should show strong warnings that the files it finds are system files and doing anything to them may and will break your system.
Anyone experience this type of behavior? or any tips on what to do would be appreciated.
Otherwise it will be another painful backup and reformat for me (boy I’m getting tired of these with Windows XP).
avast! didn’t break your computer, malware did. You have to be careful with file infectors and system patchers because removing them will break the computer. Thats why moving everything to chest or deliting everything without checking each detection is not smart in general.
Yes but it should also be the job of the anti virus/malware remover to not be as naive as allowing to remove critical system files (since I don’t know every system file I have to trust the remover to tell me which I need and which are virus files).
The malware wasn’t that bad (maybe it was stealing passwords in the background but there were no performance issues or anything serious) and the pc was working with it, but after avast it’s not, thus avast DID break it.
If I checked each detection like you say to, and posted it to forums and sent it to avast for investigation it would simply take ages (days or weeks). The whole idea of a virus remover is to make it easier to restore your computer than to do a complete reformat and reinstall (which I can in about half a day to a day if I’m lazy), so if it’s going to take a lot of effort to remove the virus it just becomes not worth it.
sorry, but I cannot see why blue screen. I would have thought post / not post (third party video driver) or boot / not boot or boot hangs. Other system files (if) in chest should still perform per status quo, I would think. but perhaps blue screen. I could be wrong. When boot calls on ndis.
Windows does run protections default. can return blue screen. These may be circumvented by booting into Safe Mode. and then you may have got a picture or maybe an error message readout or hang when ndis was called. not that the Safe Mode option would have helped in the long run as your problem almost certainly was malware.
but maybe blue screen. Maybe someone can help out here.
have you begun re-install yet. if you can boot Safe Mode you may be able to access boot log or see if anything interesting in event viewer - Windows - Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer > Antivirus and or System- check warnings and errors.