Hoax Virus Warnings

I'm always surprised by the number of fake and spoof virus warnings that still circulate despite being well out of date and with very common themes that highlight that it isn't genuine.

If you receive an email from anyone claiming to be a virus warning that needs to be passed on to everyone in your address book then the chances are that it is a hoax and purely an attempt to clog email systems and propagate a myth. If the message also claims that the warning was issued by Microsoft, AOL or Norton then the chances of the message being fake are 100%. In particular Norton never issue virus warnings as that is purely a product name not a company which is actually called Symantec.

If you receive a message like this either delete it or copy part of the text into Google and you will find many pages outlining details of the hoax warnings.

Some of the best sites for checking the validity of virus warnings and hoaxes are as follows

http://www.f-secure.com/virus-info/hoax/
http://vil.nai.com/vil/hoaxes.aspx
http://urbanlegends.about.com/

Remember to check any warning before forwarding it to all your friends and propagating the virus hoax.

Graphics Cards - PC Speed

If your PC appears to be running slowly but has a good spec processor and plenty of RAM then it may be worth checking the graphics card.

My PC has dual core, 4Gb RAM with 22" widescreen HDMI monitor but I have been unable to play HD video clips from my new Canon 5D Mark 2 camera as frames kept dropping. Having replaced the graphics card today with a new ATI Radeon 3650 with 512Mb RAM it has made a huge difference. Images now display immediately when opening in Lightroom and video runs smoothly playing through Canon Zoombrowser.

So check your graphics card as first step! In Windows Vista the new card gets a score of 5.9 compared to a score of 2.2 for the previous nVidia 6200 model.