Ocular Fusion

Do you find yourself drumming your fingers as your computer ever so sloooowly grinds and cranks along like a freshly-salted slug on a sunny, Sunday afternoon? When you sit down for an online session, do you hear menacing noises rising forth from the bowels of your desktop? When you have friends over and one of them asks to look up something on the internet, does your web browser, which lately has had a mind of its own, take them, totally unprompted, to www.niceandnakedgirls.com?

If so, then your computer may have been hijacked by the latest breed of nasty virus, adware or spyware. My computer guru Ed has recently written Part 4 to his series "Practicing Safe Surfing," and it's chock full of helpful hints on how to disinfect your hard drive so that you control your computer and not some pimply-faced geek in Indonesia with too much time on his hands. I've had a couple of bad infections over the past year (there, I'm not too proud to admit it) and the techniques Ed writes about really do work (although, as he says, you may have to repeat these a few times to get rid of the pesky bugs).

The internet is an incredible communication tool, but there are many thugs and hoodlums hanging out in the shadowy grottos of the information superhighway just waiting for a chance to mug you and make your journey a little more miserable. Caution and preparedness are the bywords for the smart and savvy web traveler, and Computer Ed is just the guide to insure you of an uneventful journey.