I hope someone can help and I apologise beforehand if I make a mess of this but this is my first entry into such a forum!
My daughter downloaded Avast4 Home Ed a couple of hours ago onto her laptop and at installation she selected what she described as a pre-boot scan or something like that (I’m not particularly computer literate). Since then or at least since after the first few minutes of hard drive activity, the screen has just been blank (black) with no audible or visual sign of anything actually happening.
Is it likely the installation has just crashed, or is something going on as part of a “long” pre boot scan?
Should I just power the laptop down and reboot?
I’m hopeing I have’nt killed her machine because she downloaded Avast on my suggestion?
The machine is an Acer Travelmate 230XC 1.7Ghz, 512MB DDR SDRAM, 20 GB HDD running upto date XP
She had no current anti virus (hence the download) but was running Spybot and Spyware Doctor.
I would say you have little choice but to use the power button to shutdown and reboot. Let us know if that gets in.
On a desktop if I want to do something like this I hold the power button in for 5 seconds, but this is when you are in windows and the system has frozen.
I don’t know if avast will try to do the boot-time scan again as effectively it didn’t do it last time. However I don’t thing avast even got into the boot-time scan as it is on a blue screen, see example image for what it looks like.
I feel a little silly now, because having stared at a blank screen for 2 1/2 hrs, I finally pressed the ESC button and everything kicked back into life.
Avast has been successfully downloaded and is now 24,000 files through it’s first thorough scan and has already found 1 trojan and a couple of adware, so things seem to be fine.
It is never a waste of time when you learn something.
The Esc key can be used to abort the avast boot-time scan, when you see the Blue Boot-time Screen in the image. So I’m not sure why you didn’t see this screen.
I assume that you are using the Simple User Interface, on-demand scan when you say ‘first thorough scan’ ?