The first thing to really do is to know your computer well. I am going to stress this since this will help a lot in the early detection of problems. If you don't know what is "normal" for your PC, then you won't know what is "abnormal". Laughing

How to do this? Well, try to examine the internals of your PC (don't be scared to experiment at this point, just be logical and just use common sense when using your PC). An easy way is to press "CTRL-ALT-DEL" on your PC if you are using Windows XP or NT. For windows 95/98 users, it's similar but be sure to press that combination only once or else your computer is going to restart itself. A popup screen will appear where you can select "Task Manager...". (If you don't know what CTRL-ALT-DEL is, then just right click on any blank space on the taskbar.. the bar with the start button on it, and select "Task Manager" from the menu that appears).

From there, you'll see the Task Manager which is essentially a list of all programs running on the computer, both your own programs and the Windows system programs. The "Applications" tab shows the list of applications that were launched and are running while the "Processes" tab shows all programs running - including the background, windows system programs that were run automatically by windows.

Get familiar with the list in the "Processes" tab. You'll see a lot of ".exe" names there and some of them will be familar, some won't. Just be sure that you are familiar with them by name. Assuming that you aren't hijacked already, that list will form your basic list of programs that run in a "normal" state. In other words, if a month from now, you see new names in there, be suspicous and see if you installed any new programs since you last looked.

Trojans and worms usually hide themselves from this list but a lot of them don't... and you'll see funny names like "gkudf.exe". If you see some, run your favorite virus or trojan scanner now! You can also look up the names on this site and see if they are good or "bad" programs.