I got my first laptop 8 years ago and decided not to get any antivirus, and haven't had any since. It was a pain in the arse and the computer got totally ruined with all sorts of viruses and malware anyway so it didn't even work. it was a nightmare, and it was constantly wanting updated, and I was always getting pop-ups and warnings and stuff, and I swear, it might have been my imagination but I'm sure it made my PC slower than it was before. I know it must sound stupid but I used to have antivirus on my old PC and it interfered with everything. I don't actually have any antivirus software. As for starting up in Safe mode and doing 'usual' virus scans. Had a good look - nothing unusual or suspicious looking.

Also, while you're running in normal mode, just have a quick look and see if there are any instances of cmd.exe or any processes that look abnormal (google the process names) and let us know if there's anything suspicious. Start the computer up in Safe Mode and perform the usual virus scans etc. It's not instantly an indicator of badness. I HAVE seen the proper HP update thing which is very similar and gives you the same options, but this was different.

It gave me the option to restart now or wait 1 hour, 4 hours etc. As I was typing this message, a bubble just appeared in my icons tray, it was headed 'HP support' and it said that a restart was needed. The programs I had open at the time were Internet Explorer, Microsoft PowerPoint and Windows Explorer. Does that mean it's copied my whole hard drive? To where? Am I freaking out about nothing? Initially I thought maybe it was saving everything because it was about to hibernate, but this happened AFTER I'd plugged in my charger, started up again and been studying for about 5 minutes. I didn't think anything of it because I've seen it spontaneously appear before. It was flashing really quickly but it looked like there was no text in the box). Now a few minutes earlier, my battery was dying and as it started hibernating, I noticed the same box appeared and flashed a few times. Hiya! My laptop just did a weird thing - I was just studying and a black box which looked like command prompt came up for a second and said something like:

Cmd screen keeps popping up