Oh no! Did you have Avast free antivirus installed? That's what got mine. There was some sort of problem with the free version and the update, caused a lot of problems for a lot of people. There was absolutely no way to recover it, either.
To save my files, though, I managed to boot the computer to DOS and manually copy files to a portable hard drive. I'm sure I missed a few things, but that's life :-P
I hoipe they didn't charge too much for a reinstall. It's a little time consuming, especially reinstalling all the software and getting updates, but, as you say, is something most of us can do on our own.
I do have AVAST installed and what you discovered is and did is what I was expecting the shop to do. That's what I was paying them for. Their expertise.
As I say, I could have done a reinstall myself and I would have waiting for my son to try something like boot to DOS. I wasn't able to get into the booting process at all. All the usual tricks didn't work.
Basically, I paid them £40 to wipe out hours and hours of work. I'd spent weekd sorting my photographs into folders, for example, so I knew which ones I'd posted to Steemit and which ones I hadn't. And I only had the edited version on my computer so I'm having to do all that work again.
You can be sure I will not be using that shop in the future. It upsets me all over again writing about it. 😢
Grrrrrrr!
Ouch! Well did luck with getting everything back to normal. I'd suggest using AVG free antivirus for awhile, since software companies don't seem to have fixed the problem.
I think I'd rather be working on my computer today... Day One of a week of meetings is going to be tough, especially after staying up late to watch meteors.
You are very lucky that you got to see the meteors @fotosdenada.
We had complete cloud cover here. 😢
I'm confused now. I can't remember if I had AVAST or AVG. I've used both in the past.
When I went to check I realised that they wiped off my antivirus software too and I haven't gotten around to replacing it. Oops! 😂