It is common knowledge that a hot forehead indicates a fever, a runny nose is symptomatic of a cold, a headache can denote dehydration. Everyone can recognize simple symptoms of human illnesses. Less known however, are the symptoms of computer ills. Some of them include a slow-down in processing speed, the appearance lots of pop-ups, the routing of the user to unrequested webpages. When this starts to happen, you can be very confident your computer is sick. The chances are very good that it has a virus.
What are computer viruses? They are malware (i.e. undesired) programs that can copy themselves onto other computers. They can do anything that any “normal†program can do. After all, that is what they are, evil programs.
When computers were first becoming popular in the 1980s, viruses originated as mere accidents caused by kinks in the programming. Later, as the computer industry evolved and became more widespread, viruses were often created as practical jokes. However, the internet and email didn’t exist then, so there was no easy method for viruses to spread. You literally had to put an infected disk into a computer and download the content in order to infect it.
Now though, viruses pose a real threat to the functionality of computers and the security of personal information. The primary reason for this is that it is so easy to spread them. Email and the internet form the perfect breeding ground. The second reason is that they are not accidents anymore and they are not harmless jokes. They can stop normal programs from functioning, copy and steal personal information (such as login IDs, passwords, etc.), track internet usage and cause ads to pop up related to that usage.
One of the best ways to avoid viruses is by installing an anti-virus program, using a limited user account rather than an administrative account, and beinging very careful about downloading and installing content from the internet and emails.
