Last night I clicked on a video on some site I ended up on. The AVG came up with a window that a virus had been stopped and suggested I quarantined it or whatever. I clicked as I have in the past OK for it to go ahead and handle the threat and was about to click "back" in the browser, when the PC started to shut down and restart. It had never done that before when AVG antivirus stops a virus. As it starts up the screen is black and just a few of the icons appear and in the wrong place. Then I get a pop up that looks like a windows utility for scanning for problems. I clicked scan and a whole list of all kinds of disastorous faults appear (memory, hard disc, programs, etc. all with gorss faults). When the "scan" is completed a "pay now" button appeared. First now did I realize what had happend, so I pulled the plug on the router (too late of course). That "Utility window" remained on the desktop and nothing could remove it. If I restarted the same thing happend again. In start menue all the Right hand stuff like Computer or Documents were gone. I ran a scan in AVG but nothing came up. So I started the PC in safe mode and did a System Restore a few day back. When I started it up again the malware seemed to be gone and the PC back to normal. It was now late and I went to bed. Today I just noticed that most files are gone from both harddiscs in the PC. I have got music and some other format files, but all pictures, all documents, videos etc seems to be gone.

I have a backup but it is some weeks old and I did a revamp of my website and have written a few documents that I rather not lose. Is there a way to recover the files this malware most likely locked up until I pay the ransom?

Any advice for someone that is not a computer genius?