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bylines are included and all links are made active. A courtesy copy of your publication would be appreciated: published@antivirus-report.comHow To Recognize If Your Computer Has A Virus Or Trojan On It. Eric Koshinsky http://www.antivirus-report.com
It isn’t always easy to tell if your computer has become infected with a virus or similar anti-social piece of software. Normally, your antivirus software will locate and identify any malicious programs that find their way onto your computer. However, in event that you haven’t yet installed antivirus software, or have let it get out of date (shame on you), here are a few things to look for as clues that you have an infection of some sort on your machine.
Disk Space Reduction The disk space reduces suddenly without any cause - this is because many viruses create multiple copies of themselves every time disk is accessed. These copies are normally made by attaching virus code to already existing programs on your system. This increases file size of newly infected file and reduces amount of space on your drive even though you did nothing.
Directory Structure Damage Some viruses destroy directory structure to achieve replication. When this happens, when you try to view contents of that folder, you may see garbage and/or incorrect files displayed on screen.
File Allocation Tables (FAT) Damage File allocation tables are used by Microsoft ™ operating systems to manage all data on computer disks. They are basically a complex record of what and where all data is located on your computer's disks. By destroying FAT, considerable data loss can happen very easily. This type of damage is not limited to Microsoft™ operating systems. All computer systems have some sort of disk data management system, and viruses are designed to attack any of them.
Improper Disk Function Some viruses, when in memory, watch all disk activity and divert system to access disk in an improper, unwanted and damaging manner. This can often be noticed by increased disk activity (for instance your disk is always active), slower open and save times, and generally slow disk performance.
Hard drive noise Some viruses watch all disk activity and when conditions for infection are matched virus will check for targets on disk and infect/destroy them if found. This search, infection, destruction requires some extra time and more disk rotations, which is often indicated by more hard drive noise, hard drive never stopping, or simply taking longer than normal to access your files. Unfortunately, these symptoms also develop when you need to defragment your disks. A good commercial virus checker will let you which is case.
Drive light glows without any reason. When some viruses take control they search for their target on all drives they can possibly access. As a result drive lights may glow (turn on) without you actually doing anything that accesses disk (saving a file, loading a file).
