Viruses are the nightmare of any PC user, but they are far less frequent nowadays in a regular environment than it is said.  However, if your computer gets infected with a virus, it is essential for you to clean your PC from them. Also, preventing infections is half a victory, so I'll share some tips about that as well.

Before talking about defense, here is a story about one of the most famous computer viruses:

In 1998, a chinese student, Chen Ing-hau, created the virus named CIH or Chernobyl. The second name was given to the virus because coincidentally, some variants of the virus triggered upon the anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. It infected over 60 million computers, causing a damage of over 1 billion US dollars. It was one of the most damaging viruses as it could destroy the BIOS (Basic Input-Output System, the "soul" of the computer) which resulted in hardware failure, ergo the people had to buy a new motherboard. It was spreading on various mediums: Yamaha even released CD drives that were infected with the virus.

From this example, we can see that defense against such programs is very important.
Here are the most common types of computer viruses:

Trojan horse

Trojan horse viruses are applications that are usually downloaded by the user. They disguise themselves as useful programs, but they do malicious stuff in the background, for example they steal your data, send your personal information, or just simply destroy some files.

Spyware

These are in relation with the previous category, as the purpose of spyware programs is to send or steal personal data without permission. These are very common, because the user himself often helps these programs to gather data. For example, browsers tend to remember your passwords and usernames, and this offers spyware programs an easy path to steal data. Tracking cookies stored by browsers help viruses to track down your computer's IP address, which can serve as a key to your stored data.

Worms

A computer worm is the "classic" form of the computer virus, spreading over various mediums such as the Internet, local networks, or over portable data storage tools. It multiplies itself and it can cause a huge damage in hundreds of thousands of computers. They are not attached to another program like most viruses.

Keyloggers

These programs are hiding in your PC's memory constantly and they store the keystrokes of your keyboard. This way, they can get access to passwords, bank account numbers and so on if the user types them while the keylogger is active.

This is my friend's Toshiba laptop. It only works upside down, with weights on its mainboard. The pic is just there for laughs, the poor laptop got cocoa poured all over it, and it suffered from serious overusage. Anyway, when I saw it while browsing my pictures, I thought that I'd share my tips about laptop brands, with some additions from my friends' opinions.

However, before I should say that this brand is good and that one is horrible, I must state that this is not that simple in all cases.

When we finally exit the shop with a huge box in our hands, all we want to do is to go home as fast as possible, plug our freshly bought computer in and experiment with it, right?

This is usually how it goes: people get excited when they buy new stuff. However, the Devil, and more importantly, the laws of Murphy never sleep, therefore when something can go wrong, it will. Here are a few tips to avoid the destruction of our PC before we even take it home.

Yes, that is very easily doable.

The above question raised so many battles between PC and Mac fans, but I will try to make my point without fueling this war too much. Most people know the basic differences between Apple computers and regular PCs: Macintosh computers have a different operating system, they look much better, and they are a gazillion times more expensive than a PC.

The question is: do you want to buy a Mac?

The following three posts will lay down some basic guidelines about buying a computer. These will be about the following topics (in order of posting):

• What to look out for when buying a computer (probably this will be posted in two parts to avoid having a wall of text)
• Macintosh or PC? (Spoiler alert: I'll say PC)
• Taking our freshly bought computer home

Let's start out with the most important one. You only need to answer a very simple question to yourself: What will I use my new PC for? This may seem an easy one at first, but it breaks down to many tougher questions which we'll go through now.

Before writing the post on PC buying guidelines (sometime today), I'd like to give some visual assistance to all the things I've mentioned yesterday. You, dear reader, may now know what the CPU or HDD is, but where the hell is it and how does it look like?

Why is it important to know this? When you buy a PC, or if you need to replace a broken cable in yours, knowing these simple stuff will make you more confident when it comes to arguing with an IT guy in the shop, or you don't need to spend money on repairs as you will know what exactly to replace and how to do it.

So, your pc may look like the one on the left, but chances for that are pretty low :) It will look something like this. What's all that stuff? Let's find out.

I'm in the middle of moving in to my new apartment, and on top of that, I got a terrible fever yesterday. Isn't this the best time for my first blogpost?

On a more serious note, I am Matthias, a BA student at Budapest, and you are reading EZ-Tec. This blog will mostly be about two things: IT support for total beginners (As we know, if something can go wrong, it will, and if we can solve a problem ourselves, why nag others?), and reviews of Budapest PC stores. These two will preferably alternate weekly, but as it would be ridiculous to have one post per week, I'll post more tips and tricks during weekdays. The blog will be mostly PC-orientated, that means we're gonna deal with a lot less Apple Macintosh stuff (however, there will be a post on when to buy one and when not to).

For starters, I think it would be appropriate to take a look at the numerous factors we need to take into consideration when buying a new PC. What are those fancy terms used to describe the parameters of a computer? How much do I need to spend on a decent machine? What is a decent machine, anyway? Let's find out, but first of all, we should have a look at the parts of a computer so these terms and abbreviations will not cause a headache later. Also, these parts will have the most influence on the effectiveness and the price of our future computer.