antivirus software, firewall softwareI learned early on how important it is to have antivirus software. Students to people who use the web on a daily basis have run into viruses, computer malfunctions, spyware, trackers, etc. My worst experience occurred a few years ago. While I’m not certain where I picked up the virus I know my firewall software had expired which is why I became open to threats. One morning I turned on my computer and it wouldn’t move past the initial operating system loading screen. I tried restarting it, opening in safe mode, all sorts of DOS commands but nothing worked. At this point, I started to freak out because the possibility of losing all of my documents, music I’d collected over the years, pictures, etc was in jeopardy. If it wasn’t for a computer savvy friend this would have happened.

We were forced to pull the hard drive, connect it to another computer before extracting the data while loading a new OS onto my computer. All this would have been avoided if my antivirus software had been up to date. Since, I am always running firewall software and have never had such a problem.