help, not sure what to do

Hello everyone. I sure hope I don't have to be a computer geek to post on here, because I'm not. Having computer problems. Not sure what the computer problem is. My husband yesterday said it was slow, not working well. McAfee was supposed to update the subscription but when I logged into their site yesterday the account indicated that it expired in August! I called them yesterday and explained the situation and they said it had updated (it was charged to the credit card, after all), and then they emailed a new installation, so I de-installed the old software and reinstalled it. Then tonight, we were listening to music on a website and I got on the computer and by using the mouse, all the sudden the screen was all garbled, even though we could still hear the music. So I tried control alt delete, but even that didn't work! Couldn't get anything shut down (I only had the one website open). Finally I turned the computer off manually, then restarted it. The computer is a Dell, a little over a year old. I then went to Dell System Restore, but it was not installed, or not working - said it wasn't there. So I went (sorry this is so long and boring) to the Dell computer site thinking I could download the System Restore software, til I came to the part where it wanted to installed an "Active X" thing - whatever that is - and I got all nervous and decided not to because it's supposed to be harmful! So now I don't know what the problem is. Do I have a virus, a trojan, is McAfree working or not? Should I clean up the system? Computer seems to work fine now. But when I was going through the troubleshooting help page of Windows (I have Windows XP), it was real slow and, like I said, system restore didn't even work at all, and a few other things I clicked on, it was just lost in space. Thanks.

 

Run ALL the steps in this Sticky thread READ & RUN ME FIRST Before Asking for Support

• Make sure you check version numbers and get all updates.

Very Important: Make sure you tell us the results from running the tutorial...was anything found? Were you unable to complete any of the scans?...Were you unable to download any of the tools?...Did you do the on-line scans as suggested? etc.

After doing ALL of the above and you still have a problem, make sure you have booted to normal mode and run the steps in the below thread to properly use HijackThis and attach the log:

Downloading, Installing, and Running HijackThis

• Make sure you also rename HijackThis.exe as suggested in the procedures. Use analyse.exe for the new name. This is very important due to some new infections going around..

When you return to make your next post, make sure you attach the following logs and that you have run these scans in the following order too:

• CounterSpy Log - only for Windows XP, 2K, & NT users
• AVG Antispyware Log - ONLY IF NEEDED you were not able to run CounterSpy. - only for Windows XP, 2K, & NT users
• Bitdefender Log - from step 6
• Panda Scan Log - from step 6
• runkeys.txt - the log from GetRunKey.bat
• newfiles.txt - the log from ShowNew.bat
• HijackThis Log

NOTE: You can only attach 3 files in a single message so it will require that you use two messages to attach all of these logs!