My pc had multiple malware infections this year. It was before I had avast, and in truth, before I had any antivirus program. I know that sounds insane, but I didn’t realize the danger. I had not been on forums like this and others, and I just didn’t know the extent of the malware problem until my pc was taken over by them. Anyway, supposedly the hard drive was scrubbed by someone for me, avast was installed, and all should be well. When I got the pc back and read up on using avast, I ran a thorough scan of the HD and encountered a cazillion infected files, all of which were moved to the Virus Chest, held there for a while, and then deleted.
From time to time, more warnings alert me to viruses, etc., and I move them to the chest. I don’t know if they are the same ones coming at me from hidden areas on the pc or new ones with the same names coming from the internet.
Question: should I run avast in Safe Mode in an effort to ferret out any hard-to-get malware? If so, would I just start up in Safe Mode and call up avast and run the scan?
No - if you have XP, vista32bit or Win2k, you could enable a boot time scan. Right click the avast icon, select Start avast! Antivirus, a memory scan will take place followed by the opening of the Simple User Interface, Menu, ‘Schedule boot-time scan…’ Or see http://www.digitalred.com/avast-boot-time.php.
DavidR:
I apologize for the delay in thanking you for your help. I am caught up in a problem about which I will post in the virus/worms forum. Though I’ve also posted in the general forum about it, I think it may need to be moved to the virus/worms forum because the cause of the problem I was asking about is probably due to viruses. Unsure, . . .
I actually feel that I need to do the aforementioned boot-time scan, but because of this problem, I’m not sure if the system can withstand a restart at this point and be stable enough to regroup successfully.