What is a computer virus? Simply put, a computer virus is a program created by a malicious programmer that takes advantage of a computer system's weakness. Many viruses are fairly harmless that display prank messages on your screen occasionally. But some viruses can be deadly to a system. A virus can be used to launch denial of service attacks on websites, to steal your financial information, or simply not letting your system to boot correctly.

Spyware/Adware, although not as same as virus, is equally undesirable on your computer. Spyware can be used to monitor your web surfing habit, record your activities, display advertisement on your PC, and slow down the computer's operations.

What can you do to avoid virus and spyware? Two things: good online habits, and adequate protections. The author of this article has never had a virus infect his personal workstation in the past five years following those two guidelines.

Protection: Antivirus software can protect your computer from virus infection, but only if you keep its virus definition up to date. All antivirus software have automatic update features build into them, but most require you to pay an annual subscription. If your virus definition is out of date, then the antivirus software will not recognize the latest viruses. Use a good spyware scanner to scan for spyware and adware. Most free spyware scanners requires you to manually scan the system, while commercial scanners can scan in the background. Like antivirus software, spyware scanner needs to have the latest spyware definition as well.

Good online habits: Do not open emails from people you've never heard of before with suspicious subjects. Also, do not open any attachments that ends with the following: "bat", "com" and "exe". Some peer to peer file sharing applications are notorious for viruses. Download files carefully from them. Many websites ask you to let them install their programs on your PC, remember you can always say no.

If all else fails, let us clean up your system for you. We'll remove all viruses and spywares, install antivirus software and spyware scanner if you don't have them already, and update them with the latest definition. We'll also go over with you what you need to do, usually very little, to keep your system clean of viruses and spyware.