Virus not detected by avast?

Viruses and worms
1

Ok I give up… HELP.

I have had avast home edition on my own laptop for two years (or more?) and never have had a problem. When my daughter got a new laptop I uninstalled Norton and installed Avast. I could venture to guess that although I have lectured her about what to do and not do on the internet to avoid viruses, etc…she has done things I would not. Well she has something terribly wrong with her 4 month old computer (running Windows xp). When it came to my attention she was having a problem I couldnt even get it to connect to the internet. Somehow (I dont remember how) I seemed to have fixed that problem. Well the computer seems to shut down at misc. times. Well, the screen goes black with no response but the power light is still on. Most of the time it will not reboot up on the first attempt, the power light will come on but nothing will happen. Usually if I leave it off for a longer period of time it will eventually reboot. I finally got avast to run a scan but it found nothing. THe computer did seem to want to turn itself off while running the scan but I got it to eventually run all the way through while in safe mode. I also ran the ad-aware which also found nothing. I tried running a boot up scan on avast but it would keep getting stuck and or turn itself off. I also get lots of errors that IE has encountered a prob and must shut down. I finally decided to try to uninstall avast and try the norton that came with the puter. After trying many times i finally got the stupid thing to install but I can not get it to install the updates (it always shuts down at that point). So now I thought I might go and uninstall any software that is familiar to me that she might have downloaded…when I get to some program called “Fate” and try to uninstall it the puter turns off once again before the uninstall button even comes up. I am frustrated. Anyone have any ideas? Sorry I dont have much to go on as I havent been able to come up with anything that actually says I have a virus/worm/horse…

Thanks for your help and I love avast and recommend it to all my friends.

Julia

2

I suggest a fully cleaning from Norton at this time… or avast won’t work.

  1. Remove NAV through Add/Remove programs from Control Panel. Boot.
  2. Use Symantec removal tool following the three steps defined in the SymNRT tool info or here.
  3. Boot.
  4. Install avast! Boot.
  5. See what you get.

I suggest that you:

  1. Disable System Restore on Windows XP: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];310405
  2. Clean your temporary files.
  3. Use a-squared, Free AVG Antispyware or SUPERantispyware (trojan removers).
  4. Then try to schedule a boot time scanning with avast again.
3

Hey thanks for your help. Everything seemed to work ok although none of the scans seemed to have found anything other than some adware. But it seems to have helped, and I learned about some great tools. Thanks!

4

You’re welcome.
Fell free to come back any time to ask for help, learn and share experience 8)