So my friend recently bought a new computer, and I went ahead and bought his old one off of him. It’s not the best rig in the world, but I figured I’d borrow the RAM for my own computer, maybe have an extra hard drive, and save the rest “just in case”.
So when I started it up, I noticed right away that it was running at a snail’s crawl. I double clicked on firefox and it took a good minute and a half before I was on his Google homepage. A minute later, I was wondering why his pop up blocker seemed so busy. Google doesn’t even use pop ups, as far as I know.
I tried to find his virus scanner to see if that was the problem, but… He didn’t have one!
Thank god I started it up and gave it a look before putting his virus ridden hard drive into my own system. I downloaded Avira AntiVir (took about ten minutes with all the worms and stuff eating up his bandwidth), started it up, and found about two pages worth of viruses.
Once I got rid of all of them, his computer actually worked like a dream. I wasn’t sure whether or not to tell him. Maybe he’d want it back when he realized how easy these problems were to fix! My conscience got the best of me, simply because I figured I’d better make sure he doesn’t make the same mistake with his new rig.
So the moral of the story is simply… if you don’t keep up to date on your virus protection, you’re going to wind up with a relatively new computer that runs like it’s ten years old. That can be great if you’re nostalgic for the days of dialup in the late nineties when it took an hour and a half just to open up your email client, but you’re probably better off getting what you paid for and keeping your computer clean, and in top shape.
I usually go with McAfee. It’s a great, all inclusive package. It takes care of spam, worms, viruses, Trojans, popups, adware, spyware, you name it. It’s a little pricy, at around fifty bucks for the whole deal, but it’s definitely worth it. If you don’t have fifty bucks to spend, there are some good bargains on antivirus programs, like Panda Antivirus, and there are some pretty good freebies, like Avira and AVGFree. Whatever you go with, run a scan every now and then, stay updated, and don’t sell your old computer off because it’s running slow until you’ve made sure to clean out the viruses first!
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