Ever see soldier ants at their anthill? They have one job -- protect what's inside. How do they do this? They stop anything unfriendly from coming in. Fortunately for the soldier ants, it's easy to know what not to let in -- if it ain't an ant, no passage allowed!

But ants going in sometimes bring things along with them, things they're carrying that could be dangerous to the life of the hill.

What if, for example, an ant out looking for food found a yummy red can full of free food just sitting there. He grabs a bunch. Heads back to the hill. The soldier ant sees the other ant is an ant, and so he's free to pass - only neither ant recognizes the food being brought in is actually poison designed to destroy the hill and everything inside. Yikes! So the ant goes in and everything's history after that.

That's what anti-virus software is like (and hopefully it can do an even better job than the soldier ant).

Anti-virus software is always on the ready. It wants to snoop around anything that's coming into your anthill (in this case, your computer). So it wants to check over:

* incoming emails (especially if they have other files attached to them, just like the ant carrying in the food/poison)

* files you download from the Internet

* it might even check emails you send out. Why? Because anti-virus software doesn't just care about your computer. It also wants to make sure if you have a virus, you don't send it to anyone else (and when you don't destroy others' computers, they're more likely to help you if yours gets destroyed).

Since anti-virus software needs to be on guard all the time, it likes to start up when you start your computer, and continues running "in the background" the whole time you're working in other programs. It's always watching. Always waiting. And sometimes it can slow your computer down as a result, but it's worth keeping your computer safe, in my opinion anyway.

And that's why anti-virus software is like a soldier ant.

Copyright (c) Grant Pasay 2005. All rights reserved.