What is a virus?
Simply put, a virus is a program which copies itself from one diskette or computer to another. A disk or computer that has a virus is said to be infected. When an infected diskette is placed in a computer, the virus can copy itself onto the hard drive of the computer, infecting it as well. If other diskettes are later placed in the computer, the virus will copy itself onto them, infecting them also. This allows a virus to spread itself among many computers.

Along with copying themselves from one computer to another, viruses may do other things - some benign (such as simply printing a message), others destructive (such as erasing files or crashing hard drives). It is important to prevent the spread of such viruses in order to protect yourself and your data.

Detecting viruses
One way to prevent a virus from being copied onto any of your diskettes is to run a virus checker program (such as F-Prot) on any computer that you use (this should be done before putting any of your diskettes in). If the virus checker program reports that the machine has a virus, do not use it -- however, do report it to one of the lab assistants outside of room 303.

Running the F-Prot virus checker on the computer
To start the F-Prot virus checker, double click on the Applications icon in the program manager, and then double click on the F-PROT Virus Scan icon. This will bring up a green screen with some blue windows. There may be a message or two in red as well -- press the Enter key until they are all gone.

At this point you should see the word Scan outlined in gray, which means it is the default action to be taken. Press the Enter key again to bring up the Scan screen (which has Begin Scan outlined in gray at the top). You can then press Enter again to begin the virus scan.

This scan will continue for a while as F-Prot checks all programs on the hard drive for suspicious code. If there are none, it will report "No viruses or suspicious files/boot sectors were found." Otherwise, it will attempt to determine what the virus is.

You can exit F-Prot at this point by pressing the Esc key (upper left of the keyboard) three times.

Running the F-Prot virus checker on your diskettes
You can also use F-Prot to check whether any of your diskettes are infected. To do this, you must put the diskette into the computer. Then go back to the menu which has Begin Scan at the top of the screen, and tell it that you want to scan the diskette drive instead of the hard drive.

To do this, use the arrow keys (bottom right of the keyboard) to move the gray outline down to the word Search, and press Enter. This will bring up another menu. Use the arrow keys again to move the black outline to the word Diskette drive, and press Enter again. Since you will be using the A: drive for the scan, just press Enter again at the next menu. The word Diskette drive A: should now be on the screen next to the word Search.

At this point, use the arrow keys to move the gray outline back up to the word Begin scan and press the Enter key. Your diskette will then be scanned for viruses. You can check more diskettes by placing them in the computer and pressing Enter again, or you can quit by pressing Esc.