Thursday, September 04, 2008

Tekkie Talk

Almost everything I know about the computer came about learning from my children (and a few from asking questions when I had a computer crash).

I wanted to warn you all about something that almost happened to me last night. I was doing a Google Search when an error message popped up. I've been online long enough (ten years now) that I recognized something that wasn't right.

My son taught me when this happens, never (NEVER) click on anything, even the cancel button but to turn off the computer. When I turned it back on, I had a new icon on the desktop, which I sent to the Recycle Bin and emptied it.

Another practice I learned from a repair person... run your virus scan at minimum when you turn on the computer in the morning and before turning it off at night. He suggested a mid day scan for people who are online all day.

All of this advice has (hopefully) saved my computer. When I ran the scan this morning, I had 89... yes, as in eighty-nine... Trojans/Viruses. I had run a virus scan yesterday morning with zero infections.

I was once again reminded to be careful when using any search engines and clicking on an unknown website (this one was page four or five into the search and not a familiar site). Hopefully all eighty-nine of those malicious "germs" are now placed in a part of my computer where they can have no affect.

By the way, the program I use is free!

ADDED NOTE: I use Clamwin!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

May I ask which program you use?

That's a part of being online that I just don't like - all the negative junk that people are trying to do to others.

Anonymous said...

Oh my, we got a virus about a month ago. We are always sooooo careful. Never open up anything when we don't know the sender.
Well, we got an annoying pop-up asking if we wanted their security.
I closed it, without opening it. Well, that was the beginning. It kept popping up larger & larger, till it took up the whole page. You COULD NOT get rid of it.
We finally found out that someone had hacked into a perfectly good program, & given them a virus! Imagine that---a virus protection program which gave us a virus (even if it wasn't their fault)!
We took the computer to the repair shop, & it cost $100.00 to fix it!
My, what next?
The people who invent these viruses----obviously they are very intelligent. I always think, "If only they would use their God-given talents for GOOD." Just imagine how much they could accomplish to help this world of ours!