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YOU NEED TO VISIT YOUR LOCAL DR TO GET A VIRUS SHOT! EVERY DAY!
You must have an anti-virus product installed on your PC, and keep it up to date. Typically, such a product will come with a new PC, but the catch is that you must subscribe to the service which updates virus definitions, or your anti-virus checker will be woefully out of touch with reality as the new viruses come along. These updates may occur every week or two, or more frequently during furious virus activity on the Internet. Subscription costs may be $10 to $20 per year. There really is no way around this. You owe an anti-virus company about $15 for each one of your PCs which you may wind up using to connect to the Internet, either for email or web browsing, or any other application which accesses the Internet.
Let me state that again - just because your new PC came with an antivirus checker doesn't mean you are safe. You must go thru the subscription procedures in order to get the routine program and pattern file updates to protect yourself. Please don't forget to do this!
Here, AVG, is a site which offers a free antivirus suite which is very good. There are no bells and whistles to this client, but it does a very good functional job. If you are like me, and you have maybe a dozen PCs in various places, states, or associated with various people and tasks, this is an good way to cut down your costs.
If you decide to finally install a virus checker after all these months or years, you should probably remove the virus checker that is currently running on your PC, looking for all those out of date viruses, and doing almost no good at all. Hopefully there is a link on the start menu to remove the old antivirus program. If not, go to the Control Panel -> Add/remove programs and do it from there. Then go to trend or symantec or AVG and download the program directly on-line. [Get your credit card ready...] Or you can go to your local computer store and buy a copy. This is probably advisable if you are on dialup, since these programs are many megabytes and will be a tough download, or you try to avoid giving out your credit card number [I don't know how you manage to do that.... these days]. Can't believe how these programs turn into bloat ware...... Megabytes of storage just to display fancy graphics. Jeez.....
The anti-virus checkers will scan, in real-time, for viruses coming in email, and in web pages. Yes, there are exploits which can happen just by going to certain ...mal-ware... web sites, or previewing an email in OE or Netscape. See the safe computing section for some protections against these problems, especially the preview techniques you can use. XP SP2 will help tremendously in alleviating some of the problems, but there will continue to be exploits of the Windows products.
You may notice that the anti-virus scanners actually change your email settings in your email client. This is because the anti-virus scanner intercepts the delivery of email to the email program [it "hijacks" the email delivery software interrupt]. Occasionally this breaks your email client. In this case, just reset your email client to what they should be, and the anti-virus will restore them on the next reboot of your OS.
You may notice that practically every time that you boot your PC these days, the antivirus needs to download the latest antivirus database. There are probably orders of magnitude more bytes downloaded to your PC by the antivirus and windows updates than there is by your simple browsing and emailing. Amazing, isn't it. SO much so that the actual download gets in the way. I often wait for the antivirus download before I activate my email client, because getting my email will interfere with the update function. So be careful.
There is also a service provided by several anti-virus companies which will do an anti-virus check on your PC for free. Some people practice restricted computing [maybe only on their company LAN, or completely isolated from the Internet, or they don't use it for email]. In this case, you can hook up your PC to the Internet [yes, you need to access the Internet] and go to this website and perform a quick scan. Hopefully you are behind a firewall/proxy server when you connect to the Internet!!! :-) if you normally operate without an antivirus scanner! http://housecall.antivirus.com is one site hosted by Trend Micro which does a very nice job. You can even do it without registering [leaving your email address], but it does require JAVA to run. So if you haven't run an anti-virus program on your PC for a long, go on over and get a free scan just to see how successful your safe computing efforts (or lack thereof) have been.
This site will let you actually upload a file and it will check the file for you to see if it is free of viruses! This could be very useful occasionally.
http://security.symantec.com is another site you can visit for free which will scan your PC for viruses. It uses ActiveX, so you must allow this if you are not currently in your browser. However, even though the Symantec site will check your PC for viruses, it will not offer to remove them! What it does is call up a page where you can subscribe and download a Symantec antivirus product. Pretty sneaky!!
Update Fall 2006: Increasingly, the antivirus suites will also come with anti-spyware and anti-spam tools. Well, why not....
The longest lasting and "most effective" virus I have seen in 2003 is the "klez" virus. This sucker has been very pervasive and hard to get rid of. Here is a program which will nuke it in its tracks. Comes from Symantec. Just download it and run it. This site contains fixes for all kinds of the recent virii. Here is another good site.
In 2004, the increasing number of nasty viruses is just depressing. There are actually viruses trying to wipe out other viruses. The spammers have joined forces with the virus and scumware writers to install viruses and trojans on your PC which actually turn your PCs into spamming machines! Disgusting.
In 2005 and 2006 the virus writers are getting smarter and smarter. It is very depressing. The best thing you can do is to STAY AWAY from questionable sites, and LOCK DOWN your email client, as suggested in the safe computing section. NEVER open an email or an attachment if you don't know who it is from, or what it is about. This ESPECIALLY goes for unsolicited emails from banks, ebay, credit card companies. These are phishing attempts.