Viruses can cause people major headaches. They can manifest themselves in a number of ways, and are not always easy to detect.

If you have standard modem access to the internet it is essential that you run anti virus software and update the virus definitions that it uses regularly. It is also advisable to run a firewall of some kind, either software or hardware. If you have broadband access, this is even  more important and we would recommend the use of a hardware firewall to give you reliable protection.

Of course viruses are the most well known, but there are other problems that can be caused by spyware and adware running on your system - if it is running particularly slowly than this may well be the cause. Running Adaware from Lavasoft (www.lavasoft.de) and Spybot S&D (www.spybot.info) regularly can keep your system free from these.

If you do fall foul of any of these malware products we can resolve the problems for you. We can can bring the machine into our workshop, back up the disc, remove any problems found and get your virus definitions up to date before returning it to you. We employ a number of different tools which together resolve all known problems. In the vast majority of cases we will return the system with all problems resolved and your programs and data intact. In a minority of cases a full operating system re-installation is necessary, but this is rare, and in this case we will retrieve as much data as possible from the backup copy of your disc.