Have you been hit by a virus?

I have used a couple of the free anti-virus programs. AVG is pretty good. If you go with one of the free programs, be sure to turn off active scanning, or whatever they call it (there are several names but they all mean the same thing). What that does is constantly search the Internet anytime you are online. It searches for new kinds of malware. It makes your protection better because it can find new potential infections before they are widely known. The problem is it runs all the time and it can slow your web surfing to a crawl because it will take up your bandwidth and CPU. On my personal computer I have a paid subscription to McAfee. Costs about 70 bucks a year but it is very good. I do not know how the infection got past it. The malware (a Trojan) uses many names but the basis is something called Vundo. I checked again this morning and it is really gone.

Yeah you right,, and that's for windows to

There are some free anti-virus programs and some of them are pretty good. Backing up files is excellent. I used to copy files to disk and save them that way but since hard drives are so huge these days, I get lazy. External hard drive is good. If you have a Mac, it will ask you when you hook it up if you want to use it to back up files. Say yes and you never have to think about it again. Macs are safer, anyway, because of their design and because the gain in creating something that will attack Macs is much less than if it hits PCs.

No the 3 1/2" disks weren't floppy but the 5 1/4" disks were. My computer had both a 3 1/2" and 5 1/4" disk drive on it as well as a 540MB hard drive, and a 2x CD-ROM drive. Man those were the days. I actually had that system up until like 2002, and the last time I booted it up just for the fun of it, it loaded up Windows 95, then i decided to part with it and got rid of it.

I certainly do remember floppy disks (they were not floppy, by the way). When we moved up to CDs I thought it was ideal. Then came DVDs. The time will come when you can copy all of your files, word processing, spreadsheets, music, movies, everything, onto a single disk. So any time you look at the news and begin to think that things have deteriorated, remember that some things are a whole lot better than they used to be.