Many people know this, but one way viruses perpetuate themselves by replicating themselves, then sending copies to everyone in the address book of the infected system. The problem is that often you won't know that you have a virus until AFTER the virus has been sent to everyone in your address book, which can cause problems for your friends and family.

There is something that you can do that can help, though, especially if you are using Outlook or Outlook Express as your email applications. (This may also work on some othr email packages, but with some, it probably won't help at all.)

Add an entry to your address book for "~", and for the email address, give it an address that is totally bogus and non-existant, such as "abc.moc". Okay, why does this help? Well, a tilda (~) will be the first address that is seen. So a virus would attempt to send to ~@abc.moc. Outlook, Outlook Express, and several other email applications will NOT send a second email if the first one fails, so it would stop right there. For those that DO send even if an email fails, it can still be helpful, because you should at the very least get a bounced message (which is to say, a message that says that the email failed), so if you don't recall sending any emails (and certainly not to ~@abc.moc), you know that something is going on, and can immediately check into it. It won't prevent the perpetuation of viruses, but it will make it harder.

ALSO, don't open any attachments, even from someone you know, unless you know that they meant to send it. Virus messages are usually very simple, so a good habit to get into is that if you are sending an attachment to someone, add 2-3 sentences to explain what the attachment is for. Avoid common virus catch phrases like "You've got to see this!", "Wow, can you believe it?", or "I'm having trouble opening this. Can you open it?" These are often "hooks" to get a user to open an attachment with a virus in it.

A word about viruses; most are fairly benign, only a few actually cause damage. In fact, some are actually cute. But for those few that cause damage, they can really mess up a system badly. Some of the worst can wipe out the MBR (Master Boot Record), and if that happens, you may as well throw away the hard drive and get another one. Many people want to use "free" antivirus applications, which are better than absolutely nothing, but consider this; you get what you pay for. If you don't feel that you can spend the $25 a year for a quality AV program like McAfee or Norton, consider it this way...is the information on your system worth $25 to you? If it is worth $25 or more, find a way to come up with the $25 to protect your system.

some more thoughts....

I agree virus protection is really a consideration every computer user should serious work on. Even the safest people will get something that at the very least they could pass on to someone else.

While commercial programs have certain advantages sometimes a free thing can be good enough. I would draw your attention to Clamav which has crossplatform implimitaitons - clamwin and clamXav (there are linux and other variations too):

http://www.clamwin.com/
http://www.clamxav.com/

These implimentations do not force you to buy but do ask for support if you use them.

However traditional viruses are about email and email attachments. There is another venue virus-like behavior (worms, trojans,...etc) are also to be found - on website browsing. They aren't very likely on mainline websites but a hacked website could be host such a thing. However a software version of these kinds of problems is adware-malware. Most anti-virus programs do some work against such problems. Clamav doesn't do much yet directly about these things. There are some proxy plugin support for such scanning but they are not for the average user to try. One proxy service that does do some adware-malware type protection is Privoxy. It is built as a service you run on your local machine (rather than having setup a server as many proxy programs assume) and you point your browser to it (and if you are behind some other proxy with alittle more work you can have privoxy use that proxy too.) At the very least it'll cut out some, even many, adverts you run across on the internet....

http://www.privoxy.org/

__________________
Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart!
They that believe in vain thoughts forsake their own mercy.

Very good points. Also, people can get viruses (including trojans and worms) from IM programs and file sharing programs. This may seem like a no brainer to some people, but not to others. Much less commonly, a person can get a virus from downloading a program or information off the web. More often, though, AV programs will give a false positive in that instance.

When a person tells me that they can't afford $30 for a quality AV program, my normal response is, "You don't have $30 worth of programs and data on your system? You're lucky!" Personally, if I had to replace everything I have installed, it would probably cost me more than $200, and that is taking into consideration that some things I can easily reinstall, and others, my job would reinstall for me. That is not even counting the few viruses that could damage hard drives...then it starts getting expensive! I don't have a problem paying $30 to protect my computer. After all, I also have car insurance on my car...same thing, except that with my car, there aren't many people purposely trying to damage it.

Then there's always those "con" antivirus that give out false reports in order for you to "purchase" the product to clean the "infections".