Virus' are bad news, upside is they cannot damage your machine, just your data. That's plenty, but backing up is always the best bet for a virus, system crash, computer theft, you name it. BACKUP and BACKUP REGULARLY. I have seen the majority of people WISH they had backed up AFTER a catastrophy. USE a virus scan, backup, and don't panic.

Another little software that is WONDERFUL is called "GO BACK" by Adaptec around $55. Adaptec is very well known and makes great software. It records EVERY move on a computer and can RESTORE it back to a given point in time. EXAMPLE: Get a virus, it wipes the data. Use go back to restore the machine to 5 minutes before the virus attack, delete the virus, go about your business. The program loads outside the windows environment, so if Windows gets blasted, it can restore it too. Works for deleted/overwritten documents too, many many uses. GO BACK will NOT find a virus, it only restores data back as it was BEFORE the virus damaged it (or whenever you want). Load a cute little program that screwed up your machine beond belief? Use GO BACK to 'UNDO' it and presto, you machine is like it was 1 minute BEFORE you pressed "INSTALL". Cool program -worth a look-

Another item you might like to investigate is a firewall such as "ZONE ALERT". as much as we stay online we are VULNERABLE to browsing by others. TRUST ME on this. This is one thing my company is freaky about as I'm tied to them and they want ME secure, to help their security. I have read a LOT on this and I have experimented some. I can find you on the network! Once found your machine can be written to or browsed. ANYTIME you are on the INTERNET your computer screames your address to the world, it MUST send its address for other (desired) machines to communicate BACK to you. Like giving a false address to your employer and wondering why you never get a paycheck. You must give your real address. A Firewall only sends the address to sites you initiate communications with. You are STILL vulnerable but the risk has deminished. It would freak most of you out if you knew how many hits you get a day from 'browsers'. If you have spent more than an hour a day for a couple of days YOU HAVE PROBABLY BEEN HIT and don't know it, you didn't have anything of intrest.

And now back to our feature presentation......