Everyone, that means everyone should have a good and well updated active anti-virus program. Thus we assume that either you already have such a program or will get one. If you need to know where to look check out Anti-Virus Programs.

So why do we recommend using online virus scanners?

1) It is a very good idea to doublecheck for viruses by doing an online scan periodically -- maybe once a week, once a month. Depends upon you. Just be sure to do a scan every now and then to make sure your computer softare package has not missed anything. It's like proof reading. It's always best to have a couple people do it. A second scanner is like a second pair of eyes, as we have seen in spyware scans, one package never finds everything! Take spybot and adaware. You run adaware, and it cleans your machine, run it again and it says its clean.. then run Spybot Search & Destroy and it will find extra items to block! In an ideal world one program would do it all. But this is not an ideal world. We are in the middle of a mutable battle field that changes minute by minute and it does not hurt to have a couple of compatible programs check out your machine.

To this end we recommend from time to time running either an online anti-virus scan or running a virus scan from a second anti-virus program installed on your machine. However, if you choose to have two anti-virus programs on your machine please make sure only one is set for active real-time scanning. If you have more than one anti-virus program doing real-time scanning you will have trouble. The second program needs to be manual scan only. Or a scheduled scan once a month. p.s. Don't forget to update both programs.

Below are a several online scans services. There are many more. Please be careful. There is a new trick.... some less than decent folks are putting up anti-virus scans as a way to break into your system. You will notice that Norton and McAfee are not on this list. We left out Norton and McAfee,as their scanners only detect.

HouseCall – Online scan
Panda Active Scan
RAV Online scan
eTrust Online Web scanner

The programs above have been tested by Team Newbie Helpers and we recommend them. If you choose to use a different online scanner just be aware that ActiveX is a very powerful browser plugin and you should be extremely careful which companies you trust.