My computer has suddenly popped up with all kinds of messages telling me there are fatal errors which can’t be rectified by the system restore command. However this doesn’t seem to be the computer system restore but a website that wants to charge me 80 dollars to cure the problem.I can’t do anything at all, all programmes seem to have disappeared so I am struggling. Anybody encountered this and what can I do about it?

It’s malware.
If you have access to the internet on another pc try a website called http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/

A first go might be to try “rkill” download it, then see if you can run it before the malware stops you, depending how smart it the malware this, this might be tricky.
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/anti-virus/rkill
What ever you do don’t pay any money!

sometimes starting your ‘puter in safe mode can help

Yep, don’t pay. It will only get worse 😥

Bleeping computer is a good start

I had something like this a while ago, whenever I would start up my computer a window would pop up saying I had a virus and had to pay X amount of money to get it fixed. Whenever I tried to open a program, no matter what the program was, the virus would block it saying that it was infected and I had to pay X amount of money to get it fixed.

The only way I could get rid of it was to restart my computer and then straight away spam CTRL+ALT+DELETE so that the task manager loaded before the virus did. Then I had to google all the process running in the task manager until I found which one the virus was and ending that process. After that I went on the bleeping computer website mentioned above and found a way to properly remove it from my computer.

HTH