You hear the word virus and a chill runs down your spine! With computers and laptops becoming an integral part of our lives, the risk of your PC getting infected but a malicious virus increases as well. So if you own a PC you better have antivirus software too. Be it Trojans, Spyware, Adware, Worms, Brontox, etc. your PC is vulnerable by all such viruses. Such antivirus software creates a firewall against the innumerable perilous viruses that can infect your computer.

So how exactly does your PC get infected? There are two most common reasons. The first one is through emails. Yes, if you open an infected attachment from an email and save it onto your drive, your PC will get infected. What exactly happens is that the moment you save such an attachment onto your hard drive, the attachment may release and execute a code that will perform some harmful action on your computer. The action that may be performed by this code can vary greatly like hacking passwords or confidential information like credit card numbers, etc. which may be stored on your computer. It may then even transmit this confidential data to the sender of the virus. Another way in which your PC might get attacked is extremely creepy and that is by accessing any website, the server of which has been infected by a virus. Such a virus is passed via the internet onto your hard drive and once gain the damage is beyond repair. At times, some viruses get stored in the address box and are automatically transmitted to all the people in your address box via an email. This is one way though which viruses spread like a rapid fire.

So what can you do to stay protected? Well, install antivirus software on your computer. In market McAfee, Norton, AVG, etc are the antivirus softwares that are on the top and most widely used. How exactly do such softwares help? Antivirus will scan you email attachments before you download and save them on your drive. In such a way, email worms are prohibited from infecting your PC. If your PC is already infected and you run antivirus, then the antivirus will first try to delete the intruding file and all its components. If this is not possible, it will try to repair the corrupted file which has been tailored by the virus. If repairing is also not possible then the antivirus will simply situate the corrupted file in quarantine so that it may not infect other files.

Although antivirus softwares are available for free on the internet it is always sensible to buy the full version to stay protected. Always scan your PC with antivirus every alternate day. Do not open or download attachments which you are skeptical about. Keep a check on the websites that you visit. With antivirus, there can be a cure for the infected files but it is always said that prevention is better than cure!