Understanding Viruses and Your Slow Computer

By: Chris

We have all heard the scares and the worries when it comes to your protection and your computers security. Almost every week we see at least one headline in the media about a computer breach or a virus that has infected peoples computer and is spreading fast. Even our own government's computer systems are rumored to have security breaches from time to time. Let's face it, all of our information is in computers now a days. Our daily activates and lives depend on computers. To truly understand how important our computer security is all you have to do is just imagine yourself here and now losing your computer. All the e-mails, bank accounts, credit card information, web site bookmarks, music, pictures, software practically everything gone in a second. This is a great reason for some people to want to cause havoc. They do this through viruses, adware, and spyware. What happens if our computers start to become slower? Could it be a virus?

Well the answer to that is yes it could be a virus but not likely. There are three categories that are considered to be developed for one purpose (to cause havoc) that could slow your computer down. As mentioned above they are viruses, adware, and spyware. The first, viruses, are programmed and designed to destroy. The basic plan or design of a virus is to get into your computer and to do as much damage to your computers files as possible. People have programmed them to target specific files on your hard drive that your computer needs to function correctly and destroy them. They achieve this by either totally erasing them or by rewriting them with different code that leads to other files to destroy. Viruses are purely meant to destruct your computer. If this happens than your computer will not run smoothly at all and lead to a total crash of your system or your computer to run very slow.

The second form of destruction that can influence your computers performance is adware. This is a form of virus that attaches itself to other programs on your computer. It uses the other programs and needs the other programs so it will not destroy them or erase any of their important files or content on your hard drive. Instead the adware type of virus approaches files as information giants that they can corrupt and use. Most of the time adware will rewrite some parts of important files and link itself into them. For you the user the regular programs are going to run like normal but you may see more pop ups when your online and defiantly a much slower computer because your computer is not only running the software that you want but now someone else's added software to advertise or to use an existing program.

The third form of virus is spyware. This is the form that people get concerned about most. This is what most people call the silent virus. This virus attaches itself into your computer and doesn't cause any damage or any slowing down affect. Its primary job is to gather information about you, sites you are going to, how long and how many, what programs you have on your computer, ect. It is a virus that is getting as much information about you as possible and then when you get online sending it out to a server without you knowing about it. It is a form of virus that is very intrusive on your privacy and what you are doing.

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