My mates PC is riddled with viruses, trojan and W32/Banwarum!, can’t remember all exactly, sorry.
Anyway, turns out he’s not updated his anitivirus for years, and strange things are now starting to happen… :o
I tried to save it by downloading avast!, immediately after install it threw a wobbler about having a virus in the memory and advised a boot time virus scan, this found a load of viruses which I chose ‘send to virus chest’ rather than delete, hundreds and hundreds of quarantined files later the scan stops because the disk (i assume by this it means the virus chest) is full. It appears to have removed the virus from the OS memory, but mant more files are infected.
Is there any harm in choosing to delete files rather than ‘send to chest’, am i in danger of removing important system files?
I’ve tried starting up avast to increase the size of the chest but it won’t display the user interface - it appears to start up, runs the memory check, finishes it then dissapears ??? so what i’ve been doing is removing avast, re installing it and starting the boot time scan again, until the point that the chest (or disk) fills up again…
Going round in circles… also downloaded the avast virus cleaner and ran that, … it found nothing!!
Deletion isn’t really a good first option (you have none left), ‘first do no harm’ don’t delete, some of the files sent to the chest could possibly cause a problem if deleted. However, your mate is between a rock and a hard place, if it worked great if not he is no worse off than he is now.
Personally after so long his system is seriously compromised that the best option might be to format and start clean from square one, not an option I suggest lightly. But with memory resident viruses and untold other issues his user names and passwords may be compromised and they should at the very least be changed, but no point doing this until clean.
Try and back-up what ever data you can, .doc, .xls, emails, favourites, address book. Save all user names and passwords, registration keys, ISP connection information, email account details, basically everything your friend doesn’t want to lose and what will be required to get started again, programs, anti-virus, firewall, etc. As you can see not a task to take lightly, but ultimately one that may have to be taken.
Your problem may be you need to increase the size allocated to the chest, Program Settings, Chest. You could try booting into safe mode and start the avast simple user interface (SUI), on-demand scan decline the boot-time scan if offered. right click on the skin and select settings, hopefully that will allow you to select the Chest and alter the settings for the size. Close the SUI and then open again if anything is found in memory and you are offered the boot-time scan you may get further having been able to adjust the chest size.
The avast virus cleaner is a specific tool for a limited number of viruses, listed on the page you went to download it.