Coop's Corner is the spot at the InfoSmart site where all is hardware. Every week or so the site will be updated with new practical tips on hardware and networking related matters.

Squash 'Dem Bugs

With the threat of viruses invading your home pc becoming more and more prevalent in today's higher bandwidth, highly networked society you need to take as many precautions as possible...but first a brief overview on viruses. The majority of viruses are brought in to your computer either by mail or by floppy or zip, and are in general either of three types: an .exe, a Visual Basic Script (.vbs), or Java Script (.js). The reason the majority of newer viruses are written in the latter is because they are native to the Windows environment, and both of these languages are very easy to use. How do you avoid viruses if you intend to use floppy disks, attachments to email, or shared resources over the Internet you might ask? Well, you really can't avoid viruses completely but you can limit the damage that they can do. The best piece of advice anyone could give someone looking into how to protect themselves from viruses is to simply tell them to purchase virus software. We at InfoSmart use Norton Anti-Virus, as we have found it to be extremely effective at neutralizing the threat of virus infection. However, any of the following anti-virus software vendors would be a good place to start.

for the PC

• McAfee Anti-Virus
• Symantec/Norton AntiVirus
• Stiller Research's Integrity Master
• ThunderByte

for the Mac

• McAfee Anti-Virus
• Symantec AntiVirus

All of the above vendors provide excellent products, but to get an idea of which software vendor's product is the one you want to go with check out download.com and search for product reviews given by those who have already bought a particular product.

Another small piece of advice that may seem trivial, but it is essential that we make this point: do not open any attachments under any circumstances with the aforementioned .vbs, .js, or .exe extensions. For example, the "Love Bug" virus that wiped out so many a few weeks back would have been listed in your attachment as something like LoveLetter.txt.vbs. The first .txt extension doesn't mean it is a harmless text file; it is only the second .vbs file extension that matters. To view the name of the attachment in Outlook or most email software simply right click on the attachment.

One final tip if you aren't interested in running any Visual Basic or JavaScript on your machine you can disable it altogether. For more detailed info on WSH (Windows Script Hosting) take a look at this Microsoft article http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q188/1/35.ASP Hope that helps! Check back soon for more hardware tips from Coop's Corner.