SIMPLE STEPS TO AVOID COMPUTER VIRUSES

By Isaac Meso

Computer viruses have always been a headache for many computer users, especially college students whose lives mostly depend on these electronic gadgets. Many students have suffered at the hands of this viruses especially when they are about to print their assignments.

However the billion-dollar question remains, where do these viruses come from and how do we avoid them?

Common viruses that corrupt documents
In Moi University, there have been speculations that most of the viruses that find their way into our personal computers are locally made by students from the School of Engineering. Whether this is true or not remains mere speculation. The viruses that are doing rounds in most personal computers in campus include:

Crsss.exe
Business ideas.exe
Assignment.exe.
Porn.exe.

Effects of these viruses
These viruses mainly affect Word documents, whether it is Word 07, 2010, or even the latest version of Word 2013. In a nutshell, this what usually happens when your computer is affected by these viruses. Once you save your document with the file extension of .doc or. docx, these viruses convert it into an application format with a file extension of .exe.

For instance if you save your document as Project report.doc the file will be converted to Project report.exe. The moment you try to open this file from another computer, it will not open but will launch this virus into this other computer.
This explains why your paper in this case Project report.doc will be detected as a virus, especially if the other computer has a stronger antivirus. In worse cases, these viruses end up affecting your operating system thus affecting the speed and performance of your PC.

How do you avoid these viruses?
One mistake people often make when it comes to maintaining their PCs is ignoring the simple act of updating their antivirus. Updating your antivirus goes a long away in ensuring that your computer remains a virus-free zone. Anti-viruses such as Avast, AVG, Eset-32 among others are only effective if they receive constant updates.

In my four years as a computer techie I have learnt that even the most weak antivirus can be a fireball in preventing your computer from infection if it receives constant updates.

Below are some of the easiest ways to prevent your Word documents from being corrupted by these notorious viruses.

1. Whenever you suspect your computer has a virus always save your document in Rich text format (RTF) instead of .doc or .docx. This format is not affected by this group of viruses thus your document will remain safe.
2. Always scan your computer with a different Anti-virus whenever your computer is infected.
3.  Avoid opening flash drives, especially those used to download information from cyber cafes. Such flash drives contain numerous viruses and may be bad news for your computer.