Today's viruses are far more potent than the beginner versions we saw several decades ago. Viruses may be sent by opening email attachments, clicking on spam, visiting corrupt websites and links online, opening spreadsheets or even the original method-infected disks. But the Internet is now the superhighway for virus transmission.

How can you tell if your computer has a virus? There are warning signs that your computer may be infected with a virus. For minor viruses, you may encounter strange messages, images, noises or music on your computer. An infected computer may have less memory available, or you may notice name changes. A computer infected with a virus may be missing programs, or files may malfunction. If you encounter any of these characteristics on your computer, you are most likely experiencing an attack from a virus.

What do I do if I find out that I have a virus on my computer? Know that it's not the end of the world. As a courtesy, contact everyone (by phone, preferably) you have been connected by email to warn them possible exposure to the virus right away.

Antivirus software is must-have protection. This review picks the best antivirus software based on its virus detection abilities, features, and breadth of protection. Whether you're seeking total system coverage or an ala carte solution, each of the following products provides superb virus protection for Windows-based PCs. Because every system is unique, evaluate several of these antivirus products to find the software best suited for your PC and your level of experience.

Antivirus company Sophos has released an updated version of its virus-protection software for the Mac, the company announced on Wednesday.

You've seen the alarming news reports and read the Loveletter and Melissa articles in e-zines. Maybe one of your friends has been victimized by a virus infection, and you?ve seen what it took to repair the damage. Now you?ve decided that it?s time to buy anti-virus software. How do you know what to buy? What?s the best software for your use? Will you be really protected? How much will it cost?

HP announces new antivirus concept for servers HP will sell, from next year onwards, software for its servers that will look for virus-like behaviour and then 'throttle' the relevant process

Anyone who does a lot of downloading, or accesses diskettes from the outside world on a regular basis should develop an antivirus strategy. The most important weapon in your antivirus arsenal is a clean, write-protected bootable system diskette. Booting from a clean write-protected diskette is the only way to start up your system without any viruses in memory. No virus scanner/cleaner of any quality will run if there is a virus in memory because more programs can be infected by the virus as the scanner opens the files to check them. This diskette should also contain a record of your hard disk's master boot record, partition table, and your computer's CMOS data. Most antivirus packages contain utilities that can store this information for you. Lastly, this diskette should contain your favorite scanning/cleaning software because a virus may have infected this program on your hard drive. Running it from a clean diskette will ensure that you're not spreading the virus further.

I personally use three antivirus packages concurrently. The first is viruscan from Mcafee Associates. I use it mainly because when my company started to become virus-conscious we wanted to get a comprehensive package to guard against them. Everybody we knew seemed to use Mcafee so that's what we bought. I must tell you that after seeing what some other products can do I am not that impressed with Mcafee anymore. One reason is that Mcafee tends to mis-diagnose some viruses. This is a problem because if your computer is infected with virus A, but Mcafee thinks it's virus B, it will attempt to disinfect a virus that's not there, which can badly mess things up on your system. I will say that if you are a casual computer user, Mcafee is probably all you'll ever need because it is easy to use and it does a good job disinfecting most common viruses. I still use Mcafee just because it's there, but I never take its word as gospel.

Kaspersky Lab confirmed Tuesday that a potentially serious flaw exists in its antivirus software, but said a fix is on the way.