Raining on Valentine's Day - viruses

Well, actually it's sunny and 36 here today, so no rain. But something in Kim Kommando's newsletter today bears repeating:

--> DON'T OPEN A CERTAIN VALENTINE'S DAY GREETING
Virus writers like to prey upon people's emotions. And this weekend, use care when opening any Valentine's Day e-mail greeting. Be especially wary of the attachment that may look like this: LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs. It will spread a virus to everyone in a computer's Outlook address list. Ditto for the attachments WIN.SCR or I Love You !!!.SCR.

For more, see http://www.komando.com/nl_current.asp It may not be posted just yet (right now the February 7 issue comes up).

Thank you, gardenwife. And send some of that sunshine to us folks under the clouds up north !

Thanks GW

You're welcome. I forgot to mention something important! In order for people to even see that a file is called, for example, "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs" you have to make Windows show ALL file extensions. Otherwise, all you'll see is "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt" and think it's just a text file. Scary.

This is something every Windows user should do:

1. Click START > RUN
2. Type Explorer and hit enter
3. In Explorer, click TOOLS > FOLDER OPTIONS
4. Click the VIEW tab
5. Un-Check the box next to "hide extensions for known file types"
6. Click OK

Now, you'll see the file types on every file.

Today on Ms. Komandos show she also mentioned an e-mail with "Osama captured" as the subject. Not a virus but sets you up to recieve much more junk mail. Just delete it. Don't open.

GW, in the RUN box I typed Explorer and my computer immediately crashed. ?????

Gardenwife, Thanks for the hyperlink. I ordered the 50 greatest secrets to digital photography. Actually I never heard of Kim Komando before.

It took me awhile but I finally got to the point where you said uncheck th box next to hide extensions for known file types. It wasn't checked, so I just said OK and left. Donna

Not sure why it crashed, Lani. Sorry about that! It's just a shortcut instead of clicking START > PROGRAMS > WINDOWS EXPLORER

A sidenote: Programs which reside in the Windows directory can be run by going to START > RUN and typing the program's name. Examples of this are calc, charmap, and explorer (usually!).

Weird, it worked fine two times after the system crash. Sometimes these computers just have to frustrate me to keep me thinking I want to throw them in the garbage.