Great news: I did not kill my laptop; AWFUL news: A Virus did.....& AVG has curled up & died

[Katymac]

So presumably I can try & get in touch with AVG tomorrow - but I don't hold out much hope

As both laptops are infected I am pretty well stuffed

Can I download anything to fix it in 'Safe Mode'??

I am trying Malwarebytes on the other one - should I try anything else?

Slightly TOTALLY DESPERATE needy

If I'm perfectly honest, in this situation, the best thing to do is wipe the disk and start again.

If that's not a suitable solution, it is possible to fix viruses from Knoppix. How technical are you? Is this daunting?

SUPERAntispyware removed a nasty thing that AVG/Avast didn't see .

I can't find my system disks - I feel a pratt

Can I find license numbers or anything for Windows or Office & download them or something??

Knoppix is total gobbledegoop

But thanks for suggesting it

Do you mean Knoppix itself is gobbledegook, or that page is gobbledegook.

Knoppix includes stuff you might be familiar with like Firefox and Thunderbird. Dependimg on your requirements, you might find it useful. I have in the past worked for a whole day using Knoppix, because I would have lost too much time, if I tried to fix my system at that point.

Whether that would work for you depends on your requirements.

Regarding license numbers, is their a sticker on your laptop?

Oh there is for my XP but not for my office - it is so annoying as it is somewhere

Umm I didn't even get as far as understanding it was an OS....mind you I was tired I might have a go today

Thanks for the suggestion - I will see what I can do

When you get it back up and running, I can highly recommend McAfee Antivirus. I have not had any bother since installing it.

Viruses are a real bugger, had one on my last pc. Hope you get yours back up and running.

Do you have any idea what virus it is? Try here and see if they have a solution.

I've previously downloaded anti virus software onto disk and used that to run and clean a machine.

I'd recommend Trend Micro as your antivirus as you can cover 3 machines with one license and it really is brilliant. My OH is in IT and we wouldn't use anything else.

To put the Knoppix thing as simply as I possibly can, it is a complete operating system (OS) and collection of programs, that you can run completely from CD. An Operating System is something like Windows that starts your machine and provides all the bits that programs need to run, like drivers to talk to disks, keyboard and display.

It doesn't use Windows, so even if you're Windows installation is dead you can still use Knoppix. All you need is a PC you can boot from CD and some way of downloading the CD image and burning a CD.

It includes programs like Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice, which will allow you to surf the web, read your email and even edit documents.

what bug has infected you...hopefully not trojan

Both laptops are in the shop - they are quite flumoxed