My computer was acting weird today and I had trouble booting; had to use the recovery disk and System restore. When it started up. Windows Security told me Avast was turned off; tried to turn it on, no error messages but stayed off. Checked task manager because I tried to update defs through the Avast interface; said the Avast service is turned off. Turned on the Avast Antivirus service, but it turned off (by itself) later. It said my subscription is expired, but I bought it in August of 2012, found the file “license.avastlic” and tried to insert it in “maintenance” but it returns error “the system cannot find the file specified”. I opened the file in Notepad ++ and it verifies the date of purchase (Avast Pro) as 8-5-2012 … can someone PLEASE help? I had been trying to run all the programs recommended lately to try to figure out/fix the sporadic weird behavior … the maintenance tab shows:
Subscription: 0 days remaining (in red)
Subscription Status: Active (in green)
Subscription Information: All lines blank
When I tried to reinsert the license file x 2, I got the message the file “can’t be found by the system”
I have attached the screen shot of the maintenance page; not sure what to do, first or next.
** Also, I only have AvastUI.exe*32 process showing (running) in task manager, as well as only Avast!Antivirus service. I’m certain there were more services before the computer restarted, but I don’t remember how many services there should be.
Program version: 8.0.1482
Virus Definition Version: “Unknown”
Number of Definitions: “Unknown” (the “unknowns” per the Maintenance/About Avast tab)
Vista 64 Home Premium
Program version: 8.0.1482 (Avast Pro)
Virus Definition Version: “Unknown”
Number of Definitions: “Unknown” (the “unknowns” per the Maintenance/About Avast tab)
Vista 64 Home Premium, Service Pack 2
There is something called Threatfire on here, other than that all is “on demand”, Malwarebytes and sometimes I will use on-line scanning to supplement, since I am thinking there is an infection on here; Avast finds files; one temp file (a zip) is “moved to chest” but when I was going through logs, it is apparently being recreated when Windows Search does its thing; I am not sure WHERE the “original” file is, as I checked the drive and folder it supposedly resides in, but it is nowhere I can find (and I can see all “hidden and system files”).
I also found a “ping file” that “wasn’t” a couple weeks ago on my desktop and I have NO idea where it came from; it shows as a “file”, I moved it to an external drive that isn’t handy at this moment, but I believe that opens with “Windows Shell”. When I googled the file name (it started as ‘sorry’, I do remember that, the only thing I could find was a reference to a page on Tumblr or or a similar site, but was never able to access the page. But nothing I would have saved or downloaded; there are other people occasionally using this pc, so the possibility exists. However, main point is that Avast and other scanners aren’t seeing it as a problem.
I believe the previous AV was the Avast free version.
Hi. I was having trouble getting on-line, my settings seem to keep changing. I am wondering if it might be easier to just reformat and reinstall everything; or whether a malware can still exist through that? Just because I have run numerous on-line scans, ran a thorough Avast boot time scan recently, as well as some other programs. I also sent a note to support and received a response to uninstall and reinstall Avast in safe mode.
What about the idea to reformat and reinstall OS, etc? I have 2 hard drives in my computer; one is just to store files and I use it for the Windows page file as well. If I reformatted that one first, could I safely put files there (minimum; clean copies of downloaded files for reinstall purposes, like drivers and such) and then reformat the primary partition?