Antivirus blocking everything?

Hey there
I really need some help if anyone knows what they're doing. I'll try to keep this short and sweet, but fair warning... I am a complete tech illiterate. Like, zero clue what I'm doing here 😂
My laptop Dell Inspiron 15 is only two months old. Picked it up at Best Buy with macOS pre-installed and a Norton antivirus program already on it.
From what I can gather, my daughter was doing some schoolwork when she got a notification saying the Norton subscription had expired. Since it was asking her to register or something, she just went ahead and downloaded a different antivirus, Avast.
Ever since then, the computer has been—how should I put this?—completely frozen. It boots up fine, but nothing actually opens. Nothing at all. For example, I'll click on Chrome and it just sits there spinning and spinning, but the window never appears.
Does anyone have any idea what can be done? Please help me out 😞

Honestly, just find someone who’s been messing around with macOS for years to go in and completely wipe those antivirus programs off your drive. If things get messy during the process, just try a system restore to a point right before everything went south.
That leaves you with just Microsoft Defender running natively on macOS, and then you can always toss Malwarebytes on there later to give the machine a good deep clean.

Running two different antivirus programs at once is just asking for trouble. They often end up flagging one another as threats, which creates more problems than it solves. If you just uninstall Avast, everything should run smoothly again.

Exactly... just like my colleague mentioned above, antivirus programs tend to clash. They end up flagging one another as threats, which means you really need to uninstall one of them from your computer to stop the fighting. My suggestion? Since that Norton license has already expired, just wipe it off your system entirely. Stick with Avast instead—it's free and serves as a perfectly solid antivirus program.

That’s what I was thinking too, but he insisted nothing would run—not a single thing. So, honestly, it doesn't sound like they're just handing over an antivirus to him...

In my experience, you open up an installer and suddenly there's some random bloatware trying to sneak its way onto your system. Maybe his daughter installed some extra firewall or something without thinking... people just get careless sometimes and click "next" through everything without paying attention...

The easiest move is to drop it off at a repair shop or take it to someone you actually trust to get the job done right. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if some adware or similar junk got bundled in during the installation process.