VIRUS AND ANTIVIRUS,Using Antivirus Software

The access lights on the hard drive and floppy drive turn on when there should not be any activity on that device. (However, sometimes an operating system will perform routine maintenance on the drive when the system has been inactive for a while.)
Files constantly become corrupted.
Strange or bizarre error messages appear.
DOS or Windows error messages about the FAT or partition table are displayed.
The hard drive boots but hangs up before getting a DOS prompt or Windows Desktop.
File extensions or file attributes change without reason.
A message is displayed from the virus scanner software.
The number of bad sectors on the hard drive continues to increase.
The DOS MEM command reveals unfamiliar TSRs loaded into memory.

Using Antivirus Software

Antivirus software scans your hard drive or a floppy disk for viruses, and is your best line of defense against a virus. Keep in mind that antivirus software cannot:

Prevent a Trojan horse program from being copied to your computer
Tell you that an e-mail message is a hoax
Force you to use wisdom in handling software
Look for these features when selecting antivirus software:
Ability to download new software upgrades from the Internet so that as new viruses occur, your software knows about them.
Ability to automatically execute at startup
Ability to detect macros in word-processing documents as the documents are loaded by the word processor
Ability to automatically monitor files being downloaded from the Internet
Ability to scan both files and boot sectors of hard drives and disks

Some of the better-known antivirus software programs and their Web sites are listed in the following table:

Antivirus software can work at different times to scan your hard drive or a floppy disk for viruses.

Most antivirus software can be configured to scan memory and the boot sector of your hard drive for viruses each time your PC is booted. Often it’s not practical to have it scan the entire hard drive each time you boot because that takes too much time. Consider scheduling the AV software to run at the same time every day, such as during the lunch hour. Some antivirus software can run continuously in the background and scan all programs that are executed. However, the software can cause problems with other software, especially during installations. If you are having a problem installing a new application, try turning off your antivirus software first.

Make sure your antivirus software can scan files as they are downloaded from the Internet or a network and that it can scan documents for macro viruses each time a document is opened by a word processor. Make sure the antivirus software can scan both files and boot sectors of hard drives and disks.