It all started when my sister-in-law's personal computer at home was being infected by one form of virus or another at the rate of about once a month. That was almost tragic because of the amount of important private data that was being lost, time wasted and money being needlessly spent on computer repair. In most of the virus infection incidents, her hard disk had to be reformatted not to mention some of the other hardware components were being damaged.

A lot of instances, the virus infection could have been prevented. At that time, her computer was running on Windows 98 and she never upgraded the browser, Interent Explorer version 4, to begin with. She was also using the Outlook Express program that came with Win 98 for her emails and never upgraded it. She or maybe someone in her family was fond of carelessly forwarding "chain" emails like jokes and prayers. Needless to say, all that junk mail that was being dumped on others came back to haunt her. She started receiving emails with attachments that were actually viruses. And using an unpatched Outlook Express on those kinds of email is like leaving the doors and windows of your house wide open. Sooner or later, something bad is bound to happen.

Some of her children were also fond of using internet relay chat (IRC) and/or using some form of file sharing software like Kazaa or somesuch. Using these kinds of programs are an invitation to disaster especially when you are not so experienced in the use of these kinds of programs.

The clincher, as you would have guessed by now, is that she never installed any form of anti virus program on her computer.

Therefore, drawing from real-life experience motivated me to create a website of this nature. It is indeed amazing and perhaps sad to a certain extent that some people do not take computer protection seriously. Not that the world is going to end unless you secure your computer, but if something like what was just described happened to you, you would probably have saved yourself a lot of grief if any sort of precaution was taken.

For more than a year now, my sister-in-law's computer has been working without any more troubles after heeding the advice of a brother-in-law. She's updated her browser and email software and installed an anti virus program. As for her kids, they had to take the bitter medicine--no more online chats and file-sharing software. I never asked her, but I'm sure in the back of her mind she must have thought that all the headache and needless expenses could have been avoided if she had only taken some simple steps to protecting her computer. And as you can see, the steps that were taken are simple enough. No special bachelor's degree in computer geekiness required.