Viruses:   Most computers are infected by viruses through email. and for the most part this is completely the User's fault. Viruses typically come as attachments, many advertising themselves as a fun program from a friend, and others simply making you wonder what this blank email with an attachment is. The general fact of the matter is that most viruses are actually manually installed by the user, that's right, they actually put the virus on their system! while a few strains have been known to try and exploit client sided scripts to execute themselves or worm their way in though other methods. The fact still remains that the user usually installs the virus even after the system safeguards continually pester him not to.      What happens is a user sees an attachment in his or her email and wonders what it is. he then clicks it to open it. the computer asks if he is sure he wants to do this, it could be a dangerous file, and he clicks yes. the file runs and nothing happens. the user shrugs it off, "I guess it didn't work". meanwhile the virus is spreading through his system, reading his email address book and mailing itself to all his friends.      So, as you can see to avoid getting viruses, all you have to do is really not open suspicious attachments. Having a Virus scanner such as Norton or MacAfee or the wonderful and free AVG from GriSoft (once again another German company) can help safeguard you by telling you that a file has a virus so you know not to open it, but if you are the kind of user that goes around opening strange files, you also probably don't keep your virus scanner up to date and that makes you vulnerable. You see computer viruses are like real viruses, there is no cure to it until the disease can be researched, so the first time around that a virus spreads, no scanner can help you, its only after the scanning people get hold of the virus and make some digital antitoxin that you can actually identify a virus from a normal file.      As we mentioned before there are a few other methods by which  viruses can enter your system. On windows XP, 2000, and Linux/Unix operating systems, there are viruses that can get into your computer without you doing anything. These are referred to as worms. These viruses come in from he internet, exploiting bugs in networking software. The way to avoid these is to have a firewall and simply keep your machine up to date with the free patches that the software companies provide. For windows, www.windowsupdate.com or through that little thing on your taskbar that keeps you automatically updated that you most likely ignore.   The other way Viruses get in is for a it to use a script embedded in the HTML content of an email to execute itself, this works sort of like the same way JavaScript makes a Pop-Up add. Though there is now a trend to limit the scripting support in email clients to stop this from happening, the one thing that will really help is to get rid of the preview window if you are using it. On Outlook or Outlook Express, this is a frame at the bottom of the program that shows the contents of an email every time you click on one. This is problematic especially when what you are trying to do is delete a suspicious mail or Spam mail. you click on the email to delete it or drag it into the delete items folder but by simply touching it, the mail opens in the preview pane. you can disable this option in the view->layout... menu. here you can also see the other items that you may enable or disable.