Viruses And Hardware
Yesterday, while Aliciana and I were opening up some bank accounts and we were chatting with the bank representative, she was telling us how she had just bought a new Dell computer and it had already gotten a virus. Then, she went on to tell us that she had talked to the Dell support staff and they told her the virus has ruined the computer and she needed to buy another new one!!! This brings me to the #1 computer myth I hear: “A virus killed my computer and I need to buy a new one”. Computer viruses, as yucky as they are, will not ruin your computer hardware. You should not buy a new computer when you get a virus. They will ruin all the software on the computer if they are nasty enough, so you may need to completely wipe the computer clean and start over. This means doing a full format on the hard drive and reinstalling the operating system and all the software.
If the bank lady’s story is accurate, it is horrible that the Dell support would try to sell her an additional computer. While the Dell support people usually don’t know more about computers than the people calling them, to try to sell the lady a new computer instead of offering to have her ship them the one she had just bought so they can fix it, is just plain wrong. The moral of this story is that viruses will not hurt your hardware, don’t trust Dell support, and always run an up-to-date virus scanner. Or even better, run Linux.
