The facts are simple enough - if you connect to Internet then sooner or later your computer will come under attack from a virus. The only question is what are you going to do about it.

What Is A Virus?

Put simply a virus is a tiny piece of computer programming code that can be transferred to your computer. They are usually hidden in e-mails, often as attachments but can also transfer themselves on back of any downloads you undertake from Internet. MP3 download programs such as Kazaa are notorious for this and users can often download more they bargained for. Once virus takes up residence on your computer it can do one of several things from creating nuisance behaviour on your computer e.g. interfering with characters displayed on screen, to trashing hard disk completely. These tiny programs are called viruses because they have ability to duplicate and send a copy of themselves to other users over a network or Internet via e-mail or file sharing access. They can also be transferred to other other computers not connected to original through use of floppy disks, CDs or magnetic tape. A common way for a virus to spread itself is to use a users e-mail address book as a source of recipients to which it can secretly send itself. The user generally has no idea what is happening.

What Can I Do To Prevent Infection?

I like my software simple. If it's too complex or difficult to figure out, I don't use it.

For example, I have tried a lot of different programs for creating my web pages. These include:

Namo Webeditor Microsoft Frontpage Dreamweaver NetObjects Fusion Hotdog Pro CoffeeCup HTML Editor

and a variety of other commercial, shareware and freeware editors. Each time I tried one of these, I found it too complicated. What are all these "panels" for? How to I see underlying HTML code for my page? What's a "web"? How do I begin to use this package? I just couldn't get answers to my questions easily.

Now my hard disk is bulging from growing number of HTML editors I got from download.com and then abandoned.

A couple of years ago, I discovered EditPlus. It's a very simple and easy-to-use editor. Yet is also has plenty of sophistication if you need it.