Community poll forum: Has your computer ever been infected by a virus?

My son used to trade a lot of floppies with his friends.
Before we were running continuous protection at home I got a couple of nasty boot sector beasties from web sites. Nothing in the past five years though.

Mainly because I'm using 3 different anit-virus programs. My main program is CA Anti-virus; followed closely with A2 (pronounced A-Squared); and then by Sophos Anti-virus.

No, they do not conflict with each other and the fool who thinks that any one program will protect his system is just that a FOOL.

Yes, I am behind a firewall consisting of Zone Alarm Pro, and I also use for added security Pest Patrol Coorporate (this tests the system on boot up); Micro-soft's Beta Anti-Spy; Spy-Bot 14c; XoftSpy; and Ad-Aware.

This might be over-kill to some folks out there but it has worked for me. I've been in the computer game since 1964 when a computer was an entire room if not a city block in length. Tubes were the order of the day, transistors didn't exist. Paper tape and punch cards were our means of storing data. Yeah, the computer industry has come a long way but not that far and it is still evolving. I might be called old to the younger generation, but I'm not stupid enough to trust only one program to do the job correctly.

My computer was never been infected by virus or trojan, I use HPF and it's absolutely free.

Before an antivirus, I'd recommend ditching Explorer for Firefox. Right off the bat, block mediaplex, maxserving, 2o7 and casalemedia.

Ccleaner.exe. is god. It renders Spybot NEARLY pointless and it deletes programs & applications most folks thought they deleted months ago. It addresses registry, temp files, startup, running programs, cookies, cache, history, even the cache of java and Real Player. In essence, if run at start-up and after every session, it's more likely to delete any virus you may have picked up. Aside form viruses, if Real Player's cache isn't deleted, it can build up and take lots of space.... relatively 'speaking'. CCleaner is free and easy to use.

In addition, I use Spybot & Spyware blaster to render MS Explorer completely crippled as many other MS programs are designed to use Explorer to update. These programs can lock Explorers options from being modified w/in the brower and they can lock the start-up page. Spybot also has a resident which actively guards EVERY registry modification. Spybot & Spyware Blaster are both free and easy to use.

NoAdHosts is also a free program which is downloaded once and prevents banners in the likes of Hotmail from even appearing. Once downloaded, it never needs to be run.

Of course an anti-virus which is programmed to update and run as well as a firewall.

Finally, scroll through your cookies from time to time and Google some of them. Then selectively block the ones you don't find savory.

This may sound like a lot of work, but really it's not. Most programs can be programmed to update and run on their own. The rest becomes as much habit as signing on to Yahoo or Hotmail. The only program I actively run is CCleaner. Just one.

That was a poor set of responses to choose from.
If it were only once then we wouldn't need to keep antivirus software on our computers. Those who haven't are not checking for it or have no outside connection to receive it from which means they didn't get on the internet in the first place. We keep antivirus software on our computers because viruses are continually being created or changing giving cause to remove more than one. Your percentages on your answers are not very concerting regarding the knowledge of those responding to your topics. CNET let me know what you personally think. I'm interested in your opinion. Send it to me directly not here Thanks, TLC.

There are three software you need on your machine.
1. good Anti virus - like nod32. http://www.eset.com/download/
2. good registry cleaner - like Ms-error. http://ms-errors.com
3. good adware - like ad-aware.http://www.lavasoft.com/