Hi everyone!
Gosh, sounds like something for the health category again
Got scared by the news of a computer virus spreading fast, or the latest steal-your-online-banking-account twist? Afraid to even look at an e-mail attachment nowadays? You can get some more safety by installing a virus scanner software. What it does is simple, every time stuff gets written to your harddisk, it scans it to see if there's an evil program inside.
You can either buy one of the known tools (Symantec, Network Associates) or use a free one like at http://www.free-av.com.
When you're done installing it, have a look at the settings. Most of the things you can leave as they are, but you should uncheck "scan on read" (or similar, depends on the product). That reduces the slow-down from all that scanning so you won't even notice the scanner is running. And when you can be sure that your PC is clean, there's no need to scan stuff when it's being read, right?
Just let a full system scan run after you've installed the scanner, so you can be sure everything is clean and shiny.
Like with Windows itself, your virus scanner needs to be updated. All modern programs do that on their own, they should download the latest virus info from the internet on a daily basis. Just have a look some days after you installed it, and check the date of the virus library. Most scanner vendors update daily, so your library should be quite new if everything works fine.
Of course, a virus scanner doesn't relieve you from the need to think about what you're doing. Don't open attachments when you're not sure what's inside. Don't click on links in e-mails leading to your online banking page. Banks don't send that kind of e-mail.
Okay folks, that's it for now. Feel free to post comments or questions.
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