A growing problem in using computers is computer viruses. Viruses are pesky little programs that some hacker with too much time on his hands wrote. Viruses have been known to create annoyances from displaying messages on the screen, such as "Your PC is now stoned," to completely obliterating everything that is contained on the computer's hard disk. Viruses are transferred from computer to computer in a number of ways. The most common way that users receive viruses at home are downloading programs off the internet, or off of local Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSs. These viruses are then transferred to a floppy disk when written to by the infected computer. Computers can also be infected when a disk that is infected with a virus is used to boot the computer. When this computer is infected, every one who writes a floppy disk on this computer gets their floppy disk contaminated, and risks getting this virus on their computer, which may not have good virus protection.
On IBM-Compatible PCs, viruses will only infect executable programs, such as the .EXE and .COM files. On a Macintosh, any file can be contaminated. A disk can also be infected even without any files on it. These viruses are called BOOT SECTOR viruses. These viruses reside on the part of the floppy disk, or hard disk that store the information so that these disks can be used, and is loaded into memory each time the computer is booted by one of these disks.DON'T DESPAIR!
Despite all of what has just been said, viruses are controllable. Their is
software called Virus Protection Software. A couples of programs that have been proven to work are F-PROT and McAfee's Virus Scan. These programs scan the computer's memory and the files contained on the hard disk each time the program is executed.
These programs also resided on the computer's memory. These programs will help reduce the spread of viruses.