Symptoms of a Virus Infection: Many viruses will announce that you are infected as soon as they gain access to your system.
They may take control of your system and flash annoying messages on your screen or destroy your hard disk.
When this occurs, you will know that you are a victim. Other viruses will cause your system to slow down, cause files to disappear from your computer, or take over disk space.
You should look for some of the following symptoms when determining if a virus infection has occurred:
- The programs on your system start to load more slowly. This happens because the virus is spreading to other files in your system or is taking over system resources.
- Unusual files appear on your hard drive, or files start to disappear from your system. Many viruses delete key files in your system to render it inoperable.
- Program size change from the installed versions. This occurs because the virus is attaching itself to these programs on your disk.
- Your browser, word processing application, or other software begins to exhibit unusual operating characteristics. Screens or menus may change.
- The system mysteriously shuts itself down or starts itself up and does a great deal of unanticipated disk activity.
- You mysteriously lose access to a disk drive or other system resources. The virus has changed the settings on a device to make it unusable.
- Your system suddenly doesn’t reboot or gives unexpected error messages during startups.
This list is by no means comprehensive, but it is a good start to determining if your computer has been infected.
