Before I had avast! I had AVG Free and no firewall other than Windows Defender. I believe I got a virus from getting a picture of a Ferrari from a random site from Google, and the picture or the site was infected. It started by my browser freezing and I would have to ctrl alt del to close the browser. I took it for bugs but not a virus. It got worse with the ctrl alt del freezing so I would have to hard boot the computer. Eventually I couldn’t have my computer running for more than a few minutes before it would freeze up. It affected AVG too because it would scan a couple hundred thousand files in seconds, then slow down and the computer would freeze. I know it was a virus because on a frozen scan result, it showed the virus found and the location, but apparently it doesn’t automatically remove an infection found. That could have saved me hundreds of dollars. I stupidly hard booted my computer, thinking the virus and location would be listed in the scan results but the result file was corrupted. I took my computer in and they said it had physically ruined the hard drive, or the timing was bad. Anyway, I had to buy a new hard drive and they installed avast! and Malwarebytes on it. Could someone give me an idea of what virus it was?
Well windows defender isn’t a firewall as far as I’m aware.
It is a bit too hard to identify a virus simply from a description, some images (.jpg) can be modified to include code at the bottom of the file, usually a link to a site to run malicious code. Unfortunately there is no way to determine what might have been run at the other end of this .jpg exploit.
Without the file name and location, which might reveal some malware associations or a sample of the file there really is no way to tell.
You really have to spend time reading this forum and others and learning about the different types of malware. DavidR talks about .jpg exploits, and a lot of malware comes attached to or part of image files like your Ferrari pic. To give you a general idea of what might have infected your computer.
Another example - I recall a virus coming down not as the actual video clip I was trying to download but as the small viewer attached to the clip, that I was supposed to view the clip through. The video itself had been popular for a years and was a copy of TV documentary from America’s Most Wanted. So there was senasationalist value in the video, and at the time these sensation or cult kinds of things were ideal targets for miscreants to play with.