BEGPANI.CVP 931005 DON'T PANIC! If this was the Hitchiker's Guide to Viral Programs, that would be in large, friendly red letters. Most books dealing with what to do about an infection tell you not to panic. Unfortunately, most of them seem to assume that you are reading at leisure, in advance, in time to prepare for the disaster to come. They don't tell you much of what to do when you actually *are* in trouble, unprepared, and have bought the book in a panic to find out what to do. The following section is going to be a sort of question and answer template for what to do if caught unprepared. This is far from perfect. Ideally, this should be a sort of hypertext situation where you could follow a flowchart and get help at any point. Given this is text, the help will have to be included all the way along. As soon as you get the idea of one item, you can skip any remaining text and skip to the bottom of the item to find out where to go next. Again ideally, there should be a clear "if yes, go to 5.3; if no, go to 5.4" type of progression through the questions. Because it is impossible to foresee all of the many situations you might be in, the path may get a bit fuzzy at times. For starters, I don't even know what computer you have, or what operating system you are using. Therefore, this guide will have to be very generic. At many points the direction is going to have to be, "If you don't understand this, get some etra help from your friends/user group/support staff". If you are comfortable with getting, and using, utility software from BBSes, then you will probably be able to follow this guide all the way through. I don't mean to imply that you *will* be going and geting utility software with a modem, but that "comfort level" indicates the kind of technical level people are at. You may need to use utility software at some point: it makes no difference whether it is shareware, commercial or came with the operating system. However, just because you own a commercial utility package doesn't mean you always know what it does. If you have doubts, call someone you know who is comfortable at that level and have them go over the guide with you. Please have them go through the guide with you. There are an awful lot of people out there who think they know a lot about computers. Trouble is, most of them do - but that doesn't guarantee that they know anything about viral programs. I once worked with a very capable technical support person. He was one of the first in the city to get a "dual boot" OS/2 and MS-DOS system working. He thought he was hot stuff - and, generally, he was. He thought my "expertise" in viral programs was interesting but a bit pointless ... until the day he had to ask me to clean his system. He'd infected himself while trying to clean up someone else. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1993 BEGPANI.CVP 931005 ============== Vancouver ROBERTS@decus.ca | "Is it plugged in?" Institute for Robert_Slade@sfu.ca | "I can't see." Research into rslade@cue.bc.ca | "Why not?" User p1@CyberStore.ca | "The power's off Security Canada V7K 2G6 | here."