I recently installed Avast! free, but when I open it It displays that the avast! services aren’t running. I pretty sure its probably caused by some kind of malware because this laptop was given to me by my cousins since it stopped working. I installed malwarebyte on here and run quick scan aswell as full system and it found “Spyware.password.Xgen”. And after than i installed avast! but everytime i open avast! its shows that the services aren’t running.
Btw I checked my services from Computer Management → Services & Application—> Services and the avast! service isn’t there. And i have tried to re-install and still the same problem.
I’ll upload some of the files which i found that other people had to upload while I was researching the problem.
I would say, format and do a clean install. That will not only remove malware but also rubbish/crap of the previous owner(s?) that you don’t want/need.
I though of that at the start, but they don’t have a recovery disk and im not sure if this laptop is still under warranty. And not sure if making a recovery/restore disk from this laptop would be wise, since its already infected(or i think it is).
Almost all laptops have a recovery partition. Have you check if that one has it? If it has you can restore everything to the way it was when it was bought new.
And yes, (looked at the otl log), the system is indeed infected.
Yea, I think its possible to recover to factory setting. But just a question, the files that i want to keep, How do i make sure they aren’t infected? like if malwarebyte wasnt able to detect could it be possible that other anti-virus will not be able to find them? Although most the files that i want to back up are mainly photos and some documents.
You can run a online scan of the system or the folders those files are in to see if they are clean.
If they are, back them up to cdr(w)/dvdr(w)/thumbdrive/external drive or anything like that.