@ puter illit
Sounds like an absolute nightmare all round. When you have one tech trying to correct the errors of another tech, followed by another, the Ball just gains momentum as it rolls downhill. Unfortunately things get harder to return to their original state.
Drive Imaging software is a life saver and really isn't that complex now and has saved me a lot of grief over the years. Not only should you backup as you have, keep a copy of those backups off system (so the tech can't screw those up).
My neighbour has a Western Digital My Passport 1TB 2.5inch USB3 external drive and they are coming down in price. So that is another option, for me I continue to use my 2nd HDD and do limited off system backups, but I'm certainly considering an external backup HDD.
Well, David the nightmare never ends, As I feared and got no assistance! Avast Crashed my XP Pro OS 10 Days ago. XP totally unrecoverable and had to install the original Vista Hard drive to Get back on line. Please don't tell me it wasn't Avast?
It's all over the web about the conflict I had a tech working on it for an entire week and all roads lead to Rome
. Avast sent a new update and Without thinking I installed it, then MS sent Malicious Software Tool update and I didn't but when I closed the computer it installed anyway, Next morning on Boot the computer froze, rebooted, blue screen telling me to go to Safe Mode and uninstall any new hardware or software, could not log in after 20 or so attempts, went to Safe mode, showed all my files, programs and everything running normal so I clicked on Avast to try to uninstall it and everything locked up again, had to remove battery to turn off, on reboot could not even boot back into Safe Mode called a tech over he got into bios check everything from there ran diagnostics everything running normal, every boot into Safe mode stopped at Avast file on system 32. tried to repair with OS disk stopped at Avast! Ran multiple recovery, boot disks - NOTHING worked. could only go as far as the log in window then blue screen to go to Safe mode which keeps stopping loading at system 32 Avast file. He even tried to delete Avast from the back door using the bios NOthing helped. Finally we gave up and reinstalled the Vista everything worked, no hardware issues. So FAREWELL to Avast, - When a program that knows there is a problem offers no Fix or Warning, denies its existence when asked for help when symptom indicates there is,
ignoring the probability it will Crash the OS leaving it unrecoverable, free or not it's not it's got problems. Let this be a WARNING to All XP Users! As Avast Won't