Another Day With My PC

Could you survive a day in cyberspace without an anti-virus?

For those of you who haven’t experienced a nasty malware attack yet, you might probably tinker with the thought of answering in the affirmative. I mean, how harmful can surfing at Yahoo! or Google be?

I supported such a theory a few years ago when my Norton Anti-virus licenses expired. I was kind of short back then since I poured a bulk of my savings on a gorgeous NEC LCD. Installing a pirated copy of NAV or McAfee’s Virus Scan was definitely a no no, so I tried running a newly installed XP without the protection.

I haven’t even stretched my fingers yet to type in some of the URLs which I deemed to be virus-free when a message prompted me that my computer is infected with spyware. I was quite shocked at reading the message considering that I’ve been only online for about 10 minutes.

I was so disgusted at the incident that I almost pounded my desktop’s casing. Imagine, just 10 minutes online and my computer is already infected. That meant reformatting my harddrive again and reinstalling XP. Although I could install an anti-virus to get rid of the adware, the obsessive-compulsive side of me forced me to just wipe everything off my hard drive to ensure that the malware has been eradicated. I guess that’s the best thing that anybody could do in such a situation. I’m sure the malicious application has already modified my system’s registry and other critical files.

If you don’t have an anti-virus or a registry cleaner installed on your PC, do not go online. Save yourself from having to reformat and reinstall your OS. Trust me, the headache’s definitely not worth it.