I’ve always been pretty lax about virus prevention. Having mostly Macs, it just really hasn’t been much of an issue. I’ve got this laptop running Windows XP which I’ve had for over a year and a half and I’ve never run any kind of virus scan on it. It is behind my router, but who knows what it’s been in contact with.

If you read the news (or watch any tv show or movie with computers in it), you’d think that viruses are rampant on every computer. They can magically jump through the air and infect your computer. You might as well give up, they’re already emailing your credit card numbers to every Estonian hacker.

Generally I’m pretty careful about the attachments I open and I apply security updates frequently. My mail filters even automatically delete some of the worst email-based worms. But then my XP machine started doing some weird things and didn’t want to shut down, so I decided to check on viruses.

I downloaded Avast, a free virus scanner. I installed it, set it to run a thorough search of my whole drive including archive files and went to bed.

This morning it reported that it found nothing. No viruses, worms, nothing. I was actually surprised. Surely I would have picked up at least one benign virus somewhere. As a matter of fact I can’t think of a time when I’ve ever had a computer virus, except maybe way back in college on some used floppy. Maybe I’m just missing out on all the promiscuous computer use fun.