Computer virus, just like any other software is a program which gets into the computer through the network or other external data sources and interferes with the computer’s smooth operation. It is very hard to know the agenda of these viruses as each of them are very different from one another. They could delete your data files, or attack a single program, or destroy the OS itself. Hence, it is very essential for you to protect your PC against the virus attack. Here is some trivia and methods to fix your computer from the virus attack.

A virus is generally a piece of software program which spreads through network, mostly internet. They are embedded in the web pages which get transferred to your system the moment you open them. Once they are in your system, they make a convenient entry to your registries and start the destruction process as they have all the tools required for that now. More than often these viruses are written to target a specific piece of code. You can look at this as a code wars kind of scenario. These viruses could delete the registry entries, or delete the DLL’s required of the functionality or delete the data required for the program to process. One can only know the consequences of this only after it’s infected.

Since these viruses are written by individual programmers who have their own agenda, it is very hard to predict the pattern or trace the path of these viruses. Mostly they are written by very skilled programmers who dislike one particular feature of the product and release these viruses to sabotage that program. Some of the best known viruses which have caused havoc in the computer world when released are Creeper virus, Brain boot Sector, Michelangelo, Happy99, Storm worm, and Trojan among others. The latest one in the list is Confiker which was released in late 2008. Most of these are targeted at Microsoft windows platform and infect the operating system, however other platform’s are not spared but are less attacked.

The general diagnostics to find out an infected computer is not that hard as the virus will start showing its effect even at very early stages. General malfunction, bad performance, and deletion of data are some of the symptoms. Here are some ways as to how you can fix your computer against the virus attack.

Before starting with the computer virus fix, back up your data and store it somewhere safe. Next step is to find the antivirus program which can fix this issue. While there are thousands of antivirus programs, most of them are very generic and release updates whenever there is an outbreak of a new virus. So, it is very essential to update your computer virus definition periodically. It will take a while for these companies to indentify the virus, come up with a solution and release an update to fight this. Meanwhile instead of waiting, you can go on internet and find these tiny programs which are written specific to the virus and are very effective and use it to clean the computer. An alternative solution would be to switch to a platform like Linux or Mac OS X which are less prone to virus attack.