The dark side of technology: Viruses!

While computers and technology have certainly enriched our lives, it has also caused some problems. Unfortunately for us, there are people who always exploit every opportunity they get to inflict maximum damage to the general public. I am talking about viruses.
Just yesterday, one friend of mine was working on an important assignment in MS Word 2007. He saved it and left the room for taking a break. When he came back, he couldn't open the file... MS Word informed him that the file was corrupted. After looking around for some time, I realized that the computer was infected with Brontok virus and this is probably why the document didn't get saved properly.He couldn't even access the folder where Office autosaves the documents.. because of the virus, he couldn't access the folder options menu to enable hidden files.Fortunately for him, there are some recovery tools available on the net, but none of them are free (as far as I know). And after all, why should he pay for something which he wouldn't need if it wasn't because of the stupid virus..
Needless to say, this guy didn't have an antivirus installed in his new system... Some "experts" told him that windows vista is virus free and doesn't need an antivirus. In the very first week after he got his system, it got infected! The hostel is like that, actually.. If there is a computer with no antivirus installed (or even one with an old version), chances are the computer is already infected. Whenever I lend my USB pen drive to someone, it returns with a virus. The situation is slowly improving... Guys like me are spreading the message and asking people to install antiviruses... But some don't understand why they should burden their system with an antivirus and slow down the performance. They just don't realize the extent of damage some of the viruses do.. and some of them have really low end systems who really cannot afford to sacrifice a lot of performance for safety with an antivirus. Thankfully, there are some antivirus softwares which are highly effective and don't take a lot of processing power or memory usage (like NOD32 for instance).
But think of it... Imagine a world without viruses or server attacks by hackers or Trojans or spyware. We wouldn't need antiviruses, firewalls, spyware cleaners and so on. All this would free up a considerable amount of computing power which could be used more constructively.
Think about it and post your comments!

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