Viruses are not that scary when you know a little about how they work and what you can do to minimize the damage. I've been infected a couple of times and have had to reinstall the whole system but I've only had one serious crash that wiped my entire system and that was because of a bad harddrive.
Martin's unofficial steps to keep safe from viruses:
1. NEVER keep your Windows system files on the same partition as your important files (documents, pictures, music etc). Always install your Windows on a separate partition, ideally away from everything else, including all software.
If you get infected, you have to kill your Windows. It is then much easier to just format c: instead of deleting files here and there in between your documents.
2. If you insist on using Microsoft software for web and email such as Internet Explorer and Outlook/Outlook Express, always ALWAYS have an update virus scanner running on your computer at all times. 99.99% of viruses are written to take advantage of these poorly designed programs, this is the NUMBER ONE threat. The very easiest way to infect you with a virus is to send you an email that has an attachment which is a virus. The moment you open this message it could already execute, you need the virus scanner to check all email BEFORE you are able to open them.
Either that or use something like Mailwasher (
http://www.mailwasher.net/) to filter your mail (and spam) before you start Outlook/Outlook Express. Mailwasher displays all messages in TEXT mode, thus eliminating the risk of a bad virus getting started. Mailwasher will also delete all messages you don't want from your mail server, that is before you download them with Outlook [Express].
3. Get Mozilla or Opera. Internet Explorer is notoriously unsafe to use for surfing because it has a lot more access to your system than it should. Mozilla and Opera don't have this access and thus a bad web page can't mess up your system.
4. Use Spybot routinely to kill spyware. If you don't have Internet Explorer running but it still opens windows with popups, that means you probably have spyware installed that you don't know about. Spybot is free and will eliminate it:
http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?page=download
The reason these popups appear in the first place is the poor design of Internet Explorer (point 3 above).
5. Use a firewall. If you have a Windows computer connected to the internet without a firewall in between, you are vulnerable to a range of common attacks.
6. Take backups of your files. You will rejoice the day your computer crashes. I just had a crash and a recent backup enabled me to restore my system in a couple of hours.
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