Re: Virus?

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Avrom Fischer wrote:
> "I received an email from someone I know well

That's the problem. Perfectly innocent people's PCs get infected,
even enrolled in botnets, without their knowledge, and spew the
stuff all over the Net. It's not enough that you know the person
well; you have to have confidence in his or her degree of tech
knowledge. And frankly, I'm not sure I'd trust myself. Certainly
not most of my friends and relatives. So I just NEVER click on
links (OK, those from Carl and Robert and Flash and a few others
here).

As for what else to do, you do run an antivirus program, don't
you? (Not that Avast flagged your alleged message, which I got on
both accounts). Norton is a most gosh-awful drag on system
resources, and impossible--I've heard--to uninstall. I run AVG on
my XP desktop and Avast on the Vista laptop (under Vista, AVG
requires you to submit to validation and WGA, and I won't);
Kaspersky gets good reviews in the magazines; and Panda earned my
wrath by saying one of Robert's utilities--I think perhaps
Clip--was a virus!
I have heard that cutting a pasting a link to a plain text
editor, such as Xy, will purge it of any malware piggybackers. Is
that true? Or one can type the URL itself. But, of course, if the
site itself has been hijacked or infected, that does no good either.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx