I have a dell inspiron desktop with Vista, and Avast as my antivirus protection, and yesterday when I got home from work my computer which was working fine when I left would not load windows. After a few attempts windows finally came up after about 10 minutes, but with the security center flashing. I opened it and it tells me the firewall, automatic updating, and malware protection are all turned off. When I try to turn it on it tells me it cannot turn the firewall on and gives a similar message for the others as well. It will not recognize my modem anymore either. Only about half of the time will it even load windows at all. Any ideas? I have never encountered this before and this is a fairly new pc(about 5 months old). I am assuming I have some sort of malware, if anybody has any ideas of what to use to fix this I am able to use my laptop to download software and transfer via thumbdrive. On a final note when I came home I saw that my son had turned off the power strip, and according to my wife she did not even touch the computer while I was gone so over a span of 8 hours it went from everything normal to the power being shut off and then all these problems suddenly happening
I am scanning with malwarebytes right now, what do you recomend as a antivirus software. Everyone on the net has great things to say about avast and supposedly norton and macafee are worse off than avast