I have just formatted my pc and i decided to give a try the avast antivirus after reading some good reviews about it on the net.
After installing the OS (XP), installed avast and installed a firewall, i decided to run an avast scan. I have all my data files on another partition and avast did find some adware/generic trojans, which my previous antivirus never caught.
The only concern which i have is that when i went to the avast chest under the tab system files u noticed 4 files listed there namely,
Does this means that these files are infected? And if yes and avast moved them to the Chest, why does my OS still works as expected since as far as i am concerned all these files are vital to Windows.
You will notice the avast chest is in three sections:
Infected Files, speaks for itself, any files detected by avast that you chose Move to Chest as the action.
System files, back-up copies of important system files. There are (generally) files in the System Folder of the Chest: command.com, kernel 32.dll and wsock32.dll. During the installation, avast! copies some critical system files into the Chest, under the “System files” category. Those files might cause the operating system to crash if they get infected by a virus. If needed, those files can be restored from the Chest to their original location. Should an unknown virus infect the computer despite the extensive protection from the avast! antivirus package and alter an important system file, it can then be easily restored to its original state.
User Files, an area for the user to import suspicious files that haven’t been detected so they can do no harm and can be sent by email to Alwil for further analysis.
Shortly, don’t worry, they’re there for backup purposes.
“avast did find some adware/generic trojans,”
what were they?
where were they?
can you upload to “virus total” and check them out?
to do this make a new folder for example C:\Suspicious and copy them there
then go to virus total site and search- upload one at a time
post links to the results here
if FP then Avast will have been notified
You might want to run a Malware Bytes Anti Malware scan