A typical scenario is to receive a diskette from an innocent source that contains a boot disk virus. When your operating system is running, files on the diskette can be read without triggering the boot disk virus. However, if you leave the diskette in the drive, and then turn the computer off, or reload the operating system, the computer will look first in your A drive, find the diskette with its boot disk virus, load it, and make it temporarily impossible to use your hard disk. This is why it's important to have a bootable floppy. Allow several days for recovery.
Macro viruses are among the most common viruses, and they tend to do the least damage.
Macro viruses infect your Microsoft Word applications and typically insert unwanted words or phrases. Additionally, there are viruses that propogate in the form of an e-mail message and contain infected Word documents as attachments. The newer viruses, considered more intrusive than previous ones, include Resume, Love Bug and New Love. Not only intrusive, but assessed by McAfee as a high-risk threat, is the Life Stages worm discovered on June 19, 2000. One way of protecting against a virus is to know the origin of each program or file you load onto your computer.