If your PC is your way of life, then it is logical to do everything to protect it. Unfortunately, most PC users which may include you are not completely aware of the extent of damage that a single virus infection can do to your PC. The infection can not only bring physical damage; it can also disrupt your life. Fortunately, there are things you can do to protect your PC and yourself from the damage of a possible infection.

Signs and Symptoms of a Virus Infection
The quickest way to find out if your PC is infected with virus is to scan it. There are free scanners available online.  Don’t get excited as you must be warned that you should only use your trusted scanners or those that come from legitimate websites and reliable manufacturers.  You see, most free scanners are used by scammers waiting to infect your PC with virus and other malware programs. Be very careful about this.
Now, to determine an infection by its signs and symptoms, you must watch out for the following:

• Your PC becomes slow and then slower and slowest.
• You start your PC and then when you are about to access your favorite program, it hangs.
• Your PC crashes too often.
• It seems like your PC has a mind of its own as it restarts by itself without your prompt.
• Your favorite program or application is nowhere to be found.
• You get too many pop-up messages or too much error messages.
• You hear unusual sounds from your PC.
• Your anti-virus program is disabled and you can’t restart the program.
• You can’t access your task manager.
• Your PC behaves like crazy.

Solution
There are other signs and symptoms of the infection.  Generally, if your PC behaves unusually, it is most likely to be infected with virus. Of course, your first line of defense is to scan your PC with your anti-virus program to clean the infection. But what if you can’t start your anti-virus program?  There are virus software removal tools you can download online.  Some are free while others come with a fee.  Just make sure you get the tools from trusted websites and manufacturers.  This can’t be emphasized enough. You don’t want to be conned by malware posing as legitimate anti-virus, do you?

Now, the saying that prevention is always better is always true.  There can never be any better solution than to prevent viruses to infect your PC. The best way to prevent the infection is to run a legitimate and updated anti-virus program in your PC. You have to make sure that the real time protection feature of the program is enabled and that it automatically updates it virus database.  It doesn’t hurt to check once in a while if the program is updated.

Although your anti-virus program runs an automatic scan of your PC, it is also wise that you do manual scanning from time to time as well as a boot scan occasionally. This will enhance the protection of your PC from virus infection.