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AntiVir Personal Edition
My Virus Protection Story
| Larry Grosskopf is an Alamo PC Past President and a Clinical Psychologist at the San Antonio State Hospital, with a keen interest in computers. He and Marta, his wife, are raising two children, Zoë, age 9 and Jackson, age 7. |
From the July, 2002 issue of PC Alamode Magazine
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I
will tell you about this program as part of a story. Mind you, this is
based on a true story, so look for yourself (I found myself guilty) and
your common computer behaviors in it. I have a friend whom I shall call
John for the sake of his privacy. John asked me to help him decide on a
computer upgrade last summer. He was interested in saving money as well
as getting value for his dollar. I encouraged him to upgrade rather than
get a completely new system. When upgrading the RAM and a new hard drive
did little to improve the performance of his computer, he decided to allow
me to build him a “new” system. I did use the new hard drive and some of
the components he had, monitor, printer, & modem. I put together a
nice, 800 Mhz, AMD system with sound built into the motherboard. He agreed
to go with an AGP graphics card and 128 MB of RAM.
The system worked well — he loved the new speed — for about 6 months. Then for some unexplained reason, it stopped working and to make a long story short, it needed a new power supply. That was done and the system worked well until about two months ago, when he began to get errors on the Windows 98 screen and he had problems accessing the Internet. He again turned to me and asked for help. Not being one to turn down a friend, I said sure. Little did I know what I was getting myself into. After some work, I had solved one of the problems but could not get rid of the others. Although I had preached to him about getting both a surge protector and a virus program, he initially did neither. Subsequent to the power supply failure, he had purchased a surge protector. However, as I worked with and examined his system, no virus protection was to be found. This created a real dilemma, since I could not hope to access the Internet; I did the next best thing. I downloaded AntiVir Personal Edition, a free for personal use virus program, onto my system and transferred it to his. Since it was 3.87 MB in size, and too large for a floppy, I used my Universal Smart Drive, a removable USB drive that holds up to 32 MB. Once it was installed and run, AntiVir discovered the SirCam C worm on his computer. AntiVir Personal Edition isolated and cleaned the scoundrel from his system. I was impressed with the program and how well it worked. For good measure, and as recommended by greater minds than mine, I also downloaded and ran a SirCam “killer program” which really and totally eradicated it. Again for editorial brevity purposes, that was not the end of the story, for his computer to finally get back to ship shape, the C drive had to be reformatted and the operating system reinstalled. Do yourself a favor, get an Antivirus program, such as AntiVir Personal Edition, if you don’t already have one, and run it regularly to avoid the mistake my friend made. I downloaded and installed the AntiVir Personal Edition virus program on his computer when I returned it to him. AntiVir Personal Edition is available online for download.
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Alamo PC Organization, Inc.
San Antonio, TX USA