Spent an hour yesterday with the computer geek – who looked all of 16 yrs old, but is actually in his 2nd year of a computer science degree – and has his own website design/hosting company to fund his way through uni. Fortunately I found him back at home in our small town on a break from studies.

He put my laptop into safe mode, ran several scans, reviewed the source code of the supposed threats, checked the registry system etc. No threats were found by any other scan programs. His conclusion was that the trojan threats reported by AVG were 'false positives' generated when I installed the 2015 version of AVG. On the AVG website forum there are other users discussing the same problem. I can't help but wonder if these IRP Hook Rootkit threats are a 'scare' to get free AVG users to upgrade to the premium or maybe they are just a bug in AVG's anti-virus program?

He checked my security and said that it was up to date and adequate and recommended not to change anything, but to monitor the AVG scans, and to keep running regular Malwarebytes scans and see if anything changes. (Other users have reported that the threats sometimes just disappear after a while). Here's hoping!

For all this help he only wanted to charge me $25.00 – if I'd taken it to the repair shop it would have been $50 minimum - and I wouldn't have learnt anything myself. We've also arranged to do some tutoring sessions at a later date on essential computer 'housekeeping' - I can remember the basics but due to illness have forgotten details learnt years ago and there's so much new stuff.

However he did also tell me that at the tender age of 5 years my laptop is officially 'old' - the new hard drive will extend it's life but to expect other things to start breaking down.
Time to start saving for an Apple me thinks.

PS: Did it snow Lara?