Free Avast expired after less than 12 hours?

I had a Trojan worm that I couldn’t get rid of over the last couple of days. I could not go to some sites I wanted to go to (pctools.com, and a couple of hobby forums that I belong to); every time I would try to go there on my laptop, it would say that the server could not be found. Immediately I went to our desktop, and got to the sites without trouble, tried again on the laptop right then and there, and it wouldn’t go. The laptop was also being directed to sites I’d never heard of before, so I downloaded the free version of Avast. Afterwards, every time I got an unwanted redirection, I would get a red pop-up saying that it was a malware page, and it wouldn’t load, which is great.

However, I could not get rid of the worm no matter where I looked for help, so I reformatted (restored to out of box state) the laptop last night, and downloaded the free version of Avast again. Then this morning, I started it up again, and immediately got a pop-up that my Avast had expired. The first time I downloaded it, prior to reformatting, I had it for more than 24 hours, closer to 48.

Could I possibly still have the Trojan worm, even after restoring the laptop to factory specs, and not going to ANY sites before getting the free Avast again? Thank you!

Nevermind, I just deleted it and went with AVG. Good grief!

If the laptop was re-formatted, the chances of the worm being present are virtually nil.

If it was simply restored, without all your files/settings etc being over-written there is an excellent chance the trojan is still there.

The likely scenario is that OEM-installed antivirus was still installed on the machine before installing Avast, or that the system date and time were out. (Check this, then try to install Avast again.)

Make sure you have a legitimate copy of Avast. You didn’t say where you downloaded it from; here are some safe links:Avast, FileHippo.

A problem exists when you get malware, and then try to install an AV to get rid of it; depending on the malware, this doesn’t always work, as you’ve seen.

I’d get the free version of MBAM and install and update it, run a quick scan, to be sure.