I’m often asked what anti-virus software I use. It’s always hard to answer the question, I really have a two-part system:

• Good backups — so the worst that can happen is I have to re-build a computer.
• A complete list of every virus that I’ve ever caught and why it’ll never happen again. I occasionally check my Windows machines with anti-virus programs (I like ClamWin) to verify, but generally you know when you have a virus the same way you know if there’s sugar in the gas tank. For anyone keeping score
  • I had to share files regularly with a computer in China, and every time I plugged my USB drive in, the computer used to copy over a viral EXE, and once I hit enter instead of delete
  • In university I foolishly connected an unprotected Win98 system directly to the internet and it was taken over by a warez group (not quite a virus, but similiar enough).
  • I actually got the Michelangelo virus back in the late twentieth century.

I don’t think I’m all that unique, the last “is it a virus” I was asked to take a look at was just a really bad HP printer driver. I may be unique in having spent more time dealing with problems caused by Norton antivirus than viruses, but I still suspect that if you practice safe computing, the threat from viruses is overstated.

At least compared to backing up.