Viruses – they CAN destroy your computer

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There are some very deliberate attacks being made on computers these days.

These offenders can be viruses, worms, Trojans, infections, pests, agents or just irritants. Some are relatively harmless, simply reporting statistics and data concerning your computer usage back to their makers. Others are serious and malicious – potentially rendering your computer completely useless. And, to make matters worse, their creators seem to have increased their attacks dramatically in 2009!

What can you do to prevent such attacks? One of the most important things you can do is to have excellent antivirus protection software installed, making sure that it is kept up to date. There are several very good ones, and there are also some that aren’t so good.

These antivirus programs are designed to capture pests on their way into your computer. And, they can do a reasonable job of that. But even the best antivirus programs out there don’t provide you with full protection – some other programs are nearly as important.

These other programs are what might be called ‘cleaners.’ They search all of the inner workings of your computer, rooting out potential troublemakers that have already made it into your computer, alerting you to them and usually giving you a choice of remedies: to destroy them or quarantine them.

I have five that I use routinely – by that I mean that I run them about every 7-10 days. These are all freeware, available for download from the Web. Each is designed to detect and eliminate one particular kind of pest. None of these cleaners does the complete job alone. In other words, just one or two won’t suffice.

My advice is to go to www.cnet.com and download Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware; Spybot – Search and Destroy; Ccleaner, Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware and 3B Software’s Registry Repair Pro. Download and then install each of these. (Note: Once they’re installed, you can delete the downloaded installation files.)

Now that you have the capability to keep your computer ‘clean,’ realize that this capability doesn’t automatically protect you. You will need to either schedule them to run (some will allow you to do this; some won’t) or run them manually. I recommend that you do this at least every 7-10 days. If you see that they aren’t finding any new ‘irritants,’ back off to once every two weeks or so. Just don’t let it go any more than that.

If you neglect to follow this advice or something very similar, you can expect to be calling one of us in the business within six months. I can pretty much guarantee it….

The author, Kim Pepperell, is the owner and operator of PC Genie in Maricopa. He has more than 35 years experience, building, operating, programming and testing computer hardware and software. He retired from software engineering and started his local business in 2006.

Photo by Michael K. Rich

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