Okay, so I did a full system scan of my laptop after seeing a lot of spam sent with my email address to people in my inbox, and I found adware that was labeled as “setup.exe” by Avast; I think it was some sort of Ezola virus, if that’s spelled right. It was tossed in the chest, and so I did the reboot requested by Avast. I then closed the laptop and went to bed since it was late. Today, I see that upon pressing the start button, Windows tells me that the computer didn’t start (presumably after the boot finished), so I let it fix its mistakes, and there were a few things out of place. I checked Avast to see how everything went, and it told me that it wasn’t on. I clicked the “turn on” button and let it load for 6 or 7 minutes several times, but nothing was happening, so I googled it and got results that told me to try and uninstall Avast and reinstall it. The exact words from the “avast! Setup Fatal Error” message were ‘Error reading product data from "C:\Program Files\AVAST Software\Avast\setup". Setup cannot continue.’ So I tried rebooting in safe mode, but for some reason, I can’t (you have to press F8 before Windows starts and go from there, right?). I ended up downloading the Avast uninstalling software, but that didn’t want to work until I tried rebooting in safe mode as well. On a good note, Windows Defender tells me that everything is running smoothly (I know that no antivirus can detect all malware, but at least there seems to be nothing majorly wrong despite my complete lack of security right now.)
Okay, now stats. I know that you need the OS. I’m not sure exactly what else you need.
OS: Windows Vista Home Edition
EDIT: I have a feeling this is going to boil down to “How to Start Windows in Safe Mode” because of how I worded this, although that just might be the solution.