Some Virus advice

I posted this in the Coffee House forum but I feel it is well worth noting here too.

There are other ways viruses and things can get into your computer. (Apart from your machine being on line and really it should not) My main audio machine is off the net but I still aquired a virus. A client brought in a USB disc drive that was infected and it jumped across to my C Drive and started replicating itself and onto every other drive I owned! I was able to get onto it before it started causing any havoc.

He visited an internet cafe and downloaded something there and a virus got onto his USB stick. He then went home and plugged it into his laptop and it jumped across to his laptop. Then it jumped over to his USB drive and when he brought it to me to transfer a Pro Tools session over for a mixing job it jumped onto my machine as well.

Microsoft have a great free program called Microsoft Security Essentials. It is free to all registered Windows users and that is all of us of course. It has all the latest updates and does an excellent job of tracking down and killing bad things.

http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

I have it installed on my main machine and a second as well. (Turn it off so it is not operating in the background on your main computer as well) If someone wants to plug something in to my main computer I do a test first on the other machine. You can point Essesntials right into the folder or drive of interest and it will do a deep scan and fairly quickly too. I also do regular checks on the main machine too and it usually passes each time. (switch back on for a check and then off again)

Be careful with this as it is a very easy way for viruses and other tojans etc to get into your perfect machine. Oh the joys of Windows. It is by far the weakest link in the whole Windows platform. It is just very poor how this operating system can be targeted so easily.
But if you are careful and vigilant you can be on top of it for sure. Complete Re Installs are just not an option for me or most of us I am sure of that.

It is just a great idea to download this program and do a full health check on your main machine. You might be surprised what you find. A full scan can take 90 mins or more. For the first scan, set it so it quarantines (or gives you the choice of what to do with them) any viruses found instead of removing them. You might accidently remove something that is important to the operating system. Check everything it finds one by one so you know what you are about to blow away! Once you know from the history list what is bad then you can safely set to remove as it finds them.

Also if it does turn up some things do the research as to what they are and what they are doing. There is plenty of info about what these viruses and trojans do and how they effect things. Often they make folders invisable and you cannot see them. It can sometimes be hard to reset your folder options to view all hidden and system files. You may have to alter the registry to bring that back to normal.

The Microsoft Security Essentials is what I use and what I recommend to my clients (I do part-time PC support).  It is also highly rated and even beat some of the"name" antivirus programs.

It does not interfere or potentially interfere with Sonar, as some programs such as McAfee can.  I had a problem with Sonar that I was dealing with Sonar Tech Support on and one of the comments from the tech was about antivirus programs and he specifically asked about McAfee as they had documented cases of it causing problems.

Yea, Essentials saved my computer home computer.  It had mcafee but something got through.  It turned mcafee off, I couldn't go back to an earlier restore point, everything.  I finally found Essentials and it cleaned the virus.  I have it on along w/ mcafee. 

@

According to this information, from a google search Essentials will automatically disable defender:

Q: Is Microsoft Security Essentials designed to replace Windows Defender?
A: No but if you are running Microsoft Security Essentials, you do not need to run Windows Defender. Microsoft Security Essentials is designed to disable Windows Defender in order to manage the PC’s real-time protection, including anti-virus, rootkits, Trojans and spyware.