I am an idiot.

[Bork]

I had AVG, but then took it off because I found out that when my Norton told me it had expired, it didn't mean that my total Norton coverage had expired, it just meant that my Norton wasn't updating itself. However, I had already deleted Norton when I installed AVG, and so when I uninstalled AVG, I was left without any sort of protection.

Naturally, I did not stop going online. As I'm sure everyone here with half a brain can imagine, my computer is now rather fucked up.

I don't want a lecture on how stupid I was. To me, this seems a lot like unwanted pregnancy. People know how to prevent them, and have access to the means to prevent them, they just don't bother. Anyways, now I'm trying to get Norton back on my computer but I'm not having much success. My Norton tried to download, but then it popped up with "An unrecoverable error has occurred. Please click Technical Support for more information." Naturally, Technical Support was not helpful at all.

WTF do I do now? I was able to download malware, or antimalware, or whatever it's called, but I guess I don't have an antiviral program? How do I make my Norton install and work? How do I get rid of anything that might have been installed on my computer? When can I stop freaking the fuck out about things?



All I want to do is watch the Office. Not kidding. That's all I want to do.

[SakuraSong]

Worst comes to worst, you'd have to do a total overhaul and reformat your hard drive, but even then I'm not sure it'd wipe your entire hard drive.

I use Avast! myself, it has protected my computer for a number of years now. Besides, Norton isn't the best anti-viral software around, that and McAfee are generally the first programs a virus looks to bypass or get around since they're so widely known and on so many computers.

There's also Spybot Search-and-Destroy, I think it was, it's a pretty good anti-viral program. Best thing of all, both are freeware, as long as it's for personal use. Good luck with your computer though! Virus infections suck major ass.

[Kirby]

I don't see how everyone's computer gets raped by viruses whenever they don't have protection...I didn't have anti-whatsit software for a good while, and when I finally got around to using avast, my computer was actually free of lovely computer STD's. AND I was going online and using limewire.

but yeah, avast. do it.

[Charli!]

AVG is good, Avast is ok, spybot is awesome for getting rid of trackign cookeia and the like (but isn't the same as an antivirus)

It amazes me too.. I've not had virus-protection for four years, in which I've never managed to pick up a virus...

[rowan]

and yet, I have very good antivirus protection, keep up to date, am behind a firewall, am pretty savvy about stuff, yadda yadda and I still got infected (the local newspaper was hacked about a month ago). *shrug*

If it's really bad you'll have to wipe and re-install. Some viruses are smart enough to prevent your antivirus software from installing or updating correctly.

[Bork]

and yet, I have very good antivirus protection, keep up to date, am behind a firewall, am pretty savvy about stuff, yadda yadda and I still got infected (the local newspaper was hacked about a month ago). *shrug*

If it's really bad you'll have to wipe and re-install. Some viruses are smart enough to prevent your antivirus software from installing or updating correctly.

But... if I have to wipe and re-install everything, I'll lose all my Sims...


And how the hell have you people gone years without any sort of protection, and I go four days and get totally fucked?!


My computer is also doing this really weird thing where it will randomly freeze to the point where I have to manually shut it down because nothing else works. It was doing this before I took off my virus protection, so I don't think it's related. Advice on that?

[rowan]

Sometimes mine does that when it overheats because I've forgotten to vacuum out all the cat lint. Does it beep or anything? The beeps are generally a code of some kind that tells you something about what's going wrong. Once my other computer kept freezing up and it beeped and it turned out it was an issue with the DVD device driver. (Unfortunately I don't know beyond that because i wasn't the one who fixed that issue)

[monk]

mine was freezing up and shutting down because even though I have 80 gigs of memory it's partitioned into two 40 gig drives (C: & D:) and the C drive was full so I just deleted a bunch of crap and moved some other crap to the D: drive and now everything runs fine....oh and I defragmented too, (which apparently desnt't work unless you have 15% free space on the drive.

[Nachos]

Try and download AVG and do a run through with that to get rid of most of the nasties, and then choose another anti virus program of your choice. AVG is going a #9 free trail premium run, you can clean lots of things up with that.

Good luck!