How does a virus spread? What are its symptoms?
Many times a virus will elicit such symptoms as a decrease in memory or disk space. Some viruses lay dormant and do not adversely affect your machine, while other viruses can destroy valuable data. Frequently used public machines are at the most risk because of the large number of different users and floppies coming in contact with them. Files you download from the web and public FTP sites are at high risk for viruses. If you are downloading anything from the net, make sure it is from a site you trust. A virus will not infect you unless you open the file or run the program where the virus lives. There are many types of viruses. The most common type of virus in the lab is the Macro Virus, which affects MS Word and other word-processing documents. If you get error messages that do not allow you to save your documents, if your document will save only as a template, if MS Word freezes as soon as you open a document, or if your document is full of strange characters, you may have a virus. M
