Computer virus denial
Call me naive, or maybe optimistic, but I didn’t always “believe in” computer viruses. It’s probably the biologist in me. It’s hard for me to swallow the concept of an inanimate object having a living ailment. And to be fair, nobody really believes that computer viruses are real viruses. Still, I just couldn’t bring myself to admit that they do exist.
So I may sound silly, but there’s no harm in that, right? Wrong. Because of my denial, I refused to buy virus protection for my laptop. And I’ve recently paid the price. After lots of crashing and restarting, I finally took my laptop to a computer repair place. They had to reinstall the operating system (which I could’ve done myself, if only I’d made the recovery disks). Before they did the reinstall, though, they found a whopping 53 viruses! So much for not being real.
On the bright side, I didn’t really have a lot of data on my computer. And I had just done a backup less than a month before the crash. So no harm done, except for the computer repair center’s bill.
Lesson learned? I hope so. I accepted the computer shop’s free Avira antivirus software (which is a pain…now I can’t download video games). But for now, according to that software, my computer is virus-free.
The moral of the story is probably twofold. Just because you don’t believe something doesn’t make it not true. And backup your data often.
Do you use antivirus programs? Which ones?

















