from> Hey Arne, > For what it's worth, I'm with you on this one. I didn't think the post
OK, here I step into it. If you had read the joke, you would realize how ridiculous it was. "Please delete all the files on your hard drive" Come on now people, lighten up! You don't have to be a supergeek to get it. As for viruses, like the Happy99, (Has anyone actually seen that one work? You have to manually execute it (double click), and some computer graphic fireworks go off on your screen and it says "Happy 1999!" as it came out on new years, 99. Pretty benign, except it then inserted itself into your address book and emailed itself randomly to your contacts. I can't remember if it came out before the Melissa virus or after, but it was also really easy to fix and didn't corrupt any data.) anyway....Viruses aren't the end of the world like the media would like to make them out to be. They are just a royal pain in the ass. There is no such thing as a virus that will "destroy your hard drive" as so many fake warnings have claimed. They will corrupt your data though. If you can't get rid of one, then take a deep breath, and reformat your hard drive and reload all of your software, and then your backed up data. If you don't back up your important data (all of it.) on a regular basis, then you really deserve what happens, virus or no virus. Hard disks fail all the time. Data gets irreparably corrupted all the time. The answer is tried and true, back up your data! The saying goes, the amount that you need to back up is the amount of data you are willing to lose since the last time you backed up. Most people use tape drives to back up, I personally use a second hard drive in my system, as it is much faster. (It usually starts backing up in the background when I'm working every hour or so. For important reports, I also make a copy onto my zip drive.) Believe it or not, especially if you install and remove programs from your system all the time, every now and then you should periodically reformat your hard drive and reload Windows. At the college, they do it every semester. Get virus protection software like McAfee (which I use as you can download new DAT files for life as they make them.), and I check for new DAT files by McAfee at least once a week (this too I have programmed to run automatically). And make sure to set your virus protection software to do a complete scan on a regular interval. More insidious than a virus is a worm or a Trojan horse, and those are what I fear. The reason is because these are designed to search out your hard drive for your private information, then send it out online. A virus is like a treatable social disease, but a worm or Trojan horse is like AIDS. But that is another topic really. For those of you who this is all totally obvious, I apologize. But it seems that there are some novice surfers here who need some schooling. Jeff> RM was funny at all. Some sort of 'insider' joke for computer industry > folks? Not everyone is a programmer or consultant to Microsoft. In my > ignorance I didn't know if this was for real or not and after that Happy99 > business a few days ago,this latest thing scared the crap out of > me.Thank-you for continuing to look out for those of us who aren't > 'experts'. > Keep up the good work! > Steve Pye > A7 >