Computer viruses can be a nightmare. I’ve had to deal with my share of them. I can admit that I’ve been caught before myself. I was using one of the free anti virus tools, and it failed to catch a particular trojan that was running amok on my system. I only noticed because my system was becoming unusually sluggish and decided to scan with another engine.

The worst one was the owner of a business that I worked at. His home computer was crashing constantly, and I was asked to look at it and get it fixed. Now, the poor man was thoroughly ignorant on computers, so this is not really his fault. But, he had a base Windows XP install running no firewall nor any anti virus software. It was connected directly to the internet with absolutely no protection! I managed to track down that it was a certain worm, I forget which one, that had infected his computer, and we went to get him a Linksys router and some commercial anti virus software.

Right after I got this fixed, I was informed that one of the teenagers at work’s laptop was behaving badly, and the hard drive was getting full for no apparent reason. I was also informed that she had a wireless setup and had no clue about if it was secured or not. Great…

There are tons of stories, and I certainly have more. The thing I certainly recommend is for computer owners to learn how to remove computer virus infections.