Would your doctor handle your blood without donning a pair of latex gloves? Would your dentist peek into your mouth without a mask? The answer to both of these questions is a resounding “no.” Your competent healthcare professionals wear their universal precaution because there are lots of little nasties within all of us that they have no desire to contract. Who can blame them? I don’t really prefer the germs I have, little lone the germs of someone else.

That said, why then do so many people use their PCs without a good anti-virus program sitting between them and all the little computer nasties that are floating around everywhere. Anti-virus programs are the latex of the computer world. It’s no big deal to get a virus in an email attatchment if you have your protection on. Without it, though, you’re up the creek…

The number one reason most people don’t get a new anti-virus program every year is because it costs money. That is a load of crap. You don’t drive your car without changing the oil in it once in awhile and that costs money. An up-to-date anti-virus program is essential for computing today. With the Internet, there is nothing but a good virus checker standing between you and a myriad of evil code that seeks only to kill, steal, and destroy your data.

Not to sound nostalgic, but back in the day when the only interaction that occured between PCs came in the form of the almighty floppy disk, a virus checker was optional and the concept of updating definitions was something that only the power user worried about. Sadly, today, everyone needs a virus checker and up-to-the-minute definitions to have a prayer. Good news is that updating definitions is now done with one click of the mouse. In order to save your data and avoid giving your friendly neighborhood computer guru unwanted stress, install and maintain a good virus checker.

Which one, you may ask? For those of you who are a litte more technically adept, I recommend NOD32. It slows your PC down less than any other anti-virus software on the market, and its virus definitions are updated daily. For those of you who prefer a no-hands-on approach, I recommend Symantec’s Norton Anti-Virus. It does a great job and doesn’t bother its users with the details. If you want a free anti-virus program that gets the job done (most of the time), check out AVG Anti-Virus. No matter which option you choose, please, please use some form of AV program. Your data’s life may depend on it.

OS Poisoning is a phenomenon that occurs when software is installed and uninstalled in an Operating System. When poisoning occurs, a computer system runs slower than normal. An OS can become so poisoned that the system ceases to function at all. Upgrading programs from an older version to a newer version can contribute a great deal to OS poisoning because of file version conflicts. Also, when poorly written programs are uninstalled, files that should have been removed are not. If you notice that your computer is not running as smoothly as it did when it was new, there is a possibilty that OS poisoning is responsible.

There is a great deal of debate over which Operating Systems suffers most from OS poisoning. Microsoft OSs become poisoned a great deal because of the Registry. The Registry is a huge file consisting of a tree-like structure that contains settings for almost all programs installed on the system. Each time a program is installed, it grows. Once it reaches a certain size, system performance becomes sluggish. In the Linux/Unix world, OS poisoning occurs mostly because of libraries and packages that are not exactly the right version for the programs that use them. While it is true that Windows suffers from versioning issues, Linux/Unix seems to have less backwards compatibility built into its shared libraries. The point is that no Operating System written yet is immune to OS poisoning.

The only way to prevent OS poisoning is to install only the programs that you need. The rate of poisoning can sometimes be minimized by uninstalling an old program before upgrading to a newer version. This, however, can cause you to lose settings, and is not always practical. The best defense is to pray that programmers improve their practices to help minimize the problem.