Today I had to do a reinstall of Windows XP Professional on a computer. When it would get to the point where I had to hit enter to install XP it would give me a message that it couldn’t find a hard drive to install it on.

I ran the unilities to check to see if the hard drive was ok, which all passed as being ok. I then tried it again with the same thing happening again. I did a Google search and found this article:Install XP: Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer

My bios setting weren’t exactly the same but when I changed it to ata instead of what it was setting at all was great. What did we do before Google?

Before understanding what a computer virus is, it is necessary to understand what a virus is when it occurs in a living form (such as a human body, an animal, or a plant). A small organism, a virus is only able to reproduce itself within another living cell or body. It is the cause of many illnesses and diseases and is destructive to the cell or body in which it lives.

The word virus comes from Latin and literally means ‘poison’ and that is basically what it is – a ‘poison’, able to reproduce itself within another cell or body and an example of an illness caused by a virus is the flu. What do human viruses and computer viruses have in common? The computer virus can be concealed in a program, file or document and could be anywhere on your laptop.

These viruses are produced by felons, and other knowledgeable cretins with nothing better to do with their time except spread viruses to other people’s computers. The sole reason for doing this is to cause havoc. Files and documents can be severely damaged when a computer virus enters the computer, similar to the effects of influenza upon the human body. Files and documents can have a computer virus spread through them such as word-processing documents, spreadsheets, emails, computer programs etc. It can spread itself through removable storage devices such as memory sticks and floppy disks, it can spread itself through the Internet and through local computer networks. It is hard to detect because it is hidden and it can be unwittingly spread to other computers by the computer user.

What exactly does a computer virus do? In fact, a ‘digital virus’ will make your computer ill, some can be very harmful, while others are created to simply annoy and just what each type will do to your computer depends on what it has been programmed to do. Macro Viruses, Email Viruses and Trojan Horses are the names of some of the viruses. Understanding the basics of what viruses are is the first step to learning what to do about them, and how to be completely in control of your computer’s security.