I am hoping for a miracle, so any/all help will be greatly appreciated. I am a medical student but without any special knowledge of IT concepts, so please bear with me! The day before yesterday, I downloaded a free trial version of Avast from the CNET site. Immediately afterwards, my computer began doing strange things like dropping internet connection on a WiFi network, and a persistent “failure to install” message, even after the program was installed and supposedly working (the lady’s voice would chime upon startup stating I was protected). I have an old circa 2009 HP Pavilion DV9000 laptop AMD Turon upgraded to 3.0 GB RAM running on Windows Vista. It is suitable for my needs and that is why I have kept it so long. I guessed that this Antivirus program was the problem behind the problems and attempted to delete it. I could not. The Avast icon did not show up in the add/remove programs feature of the control panel and I couldn’t delete it from the Programs List. SHIT! Then it unexpectedly turned off…and rebooted in SAFE mode. In this boot mode, it was “verifying” the disk contents in 5 stages. It took forever, and I tried a hard reboot. Same thing. I left the laptop running and went to bed. In the morning when I looked at my desktop, ALL my file folders in the desktop and C drive had their contents deleted. Some 90 GB of data, study material and my thesis work has vanished. I’m in dire straits and have worked on this thesis for over a year now and cannot figure this out. I don’t know enough about computers, programming or networking to help myself. It’s my fault I hadn’t backed up my work, I KNOW. Lesson learned. I’m hoping someone out there has the time to help me out. Thanks for the read and thanks in advance…