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You’re sitting in front of the glowing screen, slaving over the latest epic, designing the perfect spreadsheet, perfecting the genetic path of your ancestors. or just composed the perfect response to the emotional wasteland of a young person in crisis.

Like all conscientious computer users, you Save your work regularly. Then you go for dinner, come back & try to open your document & it’s not there!
It might be an older version, it may have corruption in it or you may even start getting Windows errors.

You search and investigate and suddenly get the dreaded Blue Screen of Death!

There’re other symptoms; printers can suddenly be unusable, the computer may not start at all or your friends may start asking why you enquiring about whether they’re happy with their penis size. They can all point to the same cause – you’ve got virus!

There are a variety of ways in which smartasses out there in the half-life of geekland can get at your treasured hardware. Viruses are just one. There’s spam, (unwanted and unsolicited email) spyware, (little bits of code designed to track your moves and/or grab bits of information about you) and adware. (code which uses advertising to ‘support’ the programmer or to force-feed advertising into your computer space)

These coding infections come to you, courtesy of some anti-social little programmer type who has rarely met a human being, when you reach out in some way from your computer. It’s a simple fact that if you don’t allow any unknown disks into your floppy or CD slot and if you don’t connect to the Internet, none of these will affect you.

For virus detection, there’s nothing as good as an installed and updated package from a reputable company – there are numerous ones out there. We use Symantec Antivirus. It is important to install the package so it is running in the background – usually this places an icon on the task bar. About once a month, run a full system check as well.

Note that a lot of companies have Antivirus licenses that include the home PC’s of their employees. Check your work conditions.

Spam is normally handled by your ISP (Internet Service Provider) but if you get regular nasties, you can set up a Rule in your email client to dump them as they arrive. Also, most email clients (like MS Outlook) allow you to Add a Sender or Sender’s Domain to a Blacklist. Anything on the Blacklist is blocked from your Inbox.

With Spyware, you need to treat it like a form of virus infection – run a regular check of your system and have a background ‘watcher’ to monitor your Internet traffic.

We have Spybot – Search and Destroy, a free-for-personal-use program with a background stub called TeaTimer installed. It watches for any attempt to alter the Windows Registry and asks if you want it to happen. If your Registry gets corrupted, Windows stops starting.

TeaTimer is so effective, you’ll want to turn it off when you install software – some installs will modify a Registry dozens of times; most annoying having to click ‘Allow Change’ on all of them.

Adware is probably the most benign and also the most obvious of all these. You see it in programs that feature banners with ads on them, on web pages and with pop-ups that appear when you visit a page. Probably the most effective program for them is Adaware from Lavasoft – free download for personal use and you run it once a week or so.

Most AntiVirus software also looks for Spyware but I’ve found it best to have the specialist program – even with Symantec running all the time, Spyware regularly finds a list of potential threats.

You can find a variety of software to download or trial at the normal download sites like Download.com