My roommate got an HP with Vista last week and this morning I installed Avast! home edition on it. I approved a scan on restart and restarted. It scanned for about 20 minutes, and then the screen went blank. (I assumed the screen just turned off), I moved the mouse, pressed escape, and nothing happened.
Then I pressed and held the off button and left the computer off for 5 minutes. I turned it back on. The fan comes on and I can hear it working but I still get nothing on the screen. What could this possibly be? How could I possibly fix this? I’d hate to have to deal with reinstalling her Windows and losing what she’s been working on this week. (I’d also hate to admit I messed this all up!) Please help.
CJ
Overinstallation of Windows won’t make any document to be lost… only the Windows Updates will need to be applied again.
But, is there any other security program installed on this computer? Another antivirus?
Ins’t it a overheat problem… it’s strange the computer took 5 minutes to be able to turn on…
It didn’t take 5 minutes to turn on, I just let it sit for 5 minutes. I had attempted to install Norton, however it wouldn’t install because the version we have doesn’t have support for Vista. I tried to restart again, and I got the “startup repair” screen and it’s running now. Hopefully that will fix it! Would Avast cause a startup error?
CJ
Update: Startup repair cou.ldn’t fix it, but I tried to reboot again, and I got it up. Maybe it’s fixed
Since this was a new system, HP may have installed some other bundles software, which may have included an anti-virus program.
Have (or did) you another AV installed in this system, if so what was it and how did you get rid of it ?
Norton may have partially installed and could have an effect on avast.
A link worth looking at, which is a program removal tool that can remove the remnants of a number of different Norton Programs: Removing your Norton program using SymNRT
Norton was on it, I unistalled it to install a University coprorate Version. However that didn’t have the drivers for Vista and so it wouldn’t install properly.
Update: Can’t seem to uninstall Norton Antivirus 9 or later. The program suggested above says to use add or remove programs, which I did but clearly doens’t work. I was able to get Avast to load and start up, and I’m now restarting to see if that will make the uninstall for Norton work.
Worse for NAV… there are leftovers of it that are conflicting with avast.
Can’t you get some help from Symantec to get rid of all of them…?
Man, I have NAV!
@ cjmartin
Hopefully you will be OK if you got rid of NAV but if you then put the corporate version on that could have left remnants from a failed install.
Actually, I think avast! could coexist with NAV (don’t know if it includes Symantec Corporate Edition) on Vista…
According to the symptoms, it sounds a little like a hardware problem to me (power supply, motherboard, hard disk possibly…)