Viruses - My friend hates them
by: Raymond Johansen
The other day I was helping a friend of mine with his computer. He's not a very experienced computer user, and naturally he used to be one of them who didn't take the security too seriously. But that's then. He had to learn it the hard way.
My friend came to me because of the problem he had with his wireless connection. So we started to track down possible problems to find the solution. But his computer was somehow disturbed. Infact the computer was running slow, and didn't response to any commands at all. We tried to cancel several prosesses in order to free capacity, but no luck. It seemed that the computer had a lot to do and couldn't get any free power to even shut down running prosesses. In my eyes, this clearly seemed like my friend had been another innocent victim of cruel intentions and hard work.
With his computer running so slow, we decided that we should simply try to restart the system, and try to gain control over it again. So we pushed the restart button. It went black, and then it booted up for a second. As soon as it came alive again, we both looked at each other with wide open eyes. We could not believe what we saw. "Non system disk" was the message we got. It meant that his main drive on the computer was empty. No system files installed. We were gasping.
He lost his whole system because of an infection of viruses. As a disease it broke down his system, like a human disease will do to our body. He lost his music collection, his latest couple of days of work, and a lot of private stuff. He did not take any backups, only the work he had done a couple of days earlier. He could not believe it. It was like the world collapsed he told me.
I have no problem understanding him. I had a crash when I lost my whole list of merchandise. All together over 300,000 items. That was one very grey day. I then saw that a simple little thing could have spared me for all those weeks of work after that. A backup list. One single cd, memorystick, dvd, diskette, or anything that could store my extra copy of the list.
I sit here today and I know from years of experience that backups are very important. But to ensure that your computer is quick and healthy also, and doesn't collapse entirely, I seriously recommend that you get yourself a copy of some quality protection software. There are two more things I strongly recommend you to protect yourself from. If you would like to know what they are, and how to stand up against them, please visit the website described below.
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