I was having a chat with a young and rather inexperienced prospective-geek last night; a young lad around about in his early teens. During the course of the conversation – having said that he thinks Kkomp.com-Beyond is an awesome site – he said that his folks had to get a new computer because theirs picked up a virus.

I was rather stunned at first, and I enquired as to the identity of this mysterious virus that causes people to have to renew their entire computer. He couldn’t remember what the name of the virus was, nor indeed if the infection on his folks’ computer had ever been properly identified. I informed him that the situation could probably have been remedied by doing something like – at the most draconian type of intervention – wiping the entire hard-drive, reformatting it, and starting again from a blank slate. He replied with fervour that nothing could be done with it as it just wouldn’t start, and eventually came up with a Blue Screen of Death! (BSOD) – In other words he was saying that the machine was, to his mind, as taught to him by his folks, irretrievably damaged and beyond any feasible recovery.

Quite obviously his folks weren’t at all technically-minded: There is no virus that can by itself damage or destroy hardware. Whilst it is true that becoming infected by badly-coded spyware and malware routines can slow down your computer, thereby wearing it out faster due to excessive loading of its’ components, there is no virus or other type of malware that can instantly and to order render a piece of hardware inoperable.

A BIOS virus is capable of scrambling or rewriting the sensitive machine-code instructions in your computer’s BIOS, thereby in many cases effectively rendering the BIOS ineffective/beyond reasonable repair due to constraints of cost-efficiency, but even in that scenario the virus, which is software, does not actually damage the micro-component-structure of the BIOS-chip itself; which is hardware.

Take it from me; the most complicated side of a computer is software rather than hardware: Your computer’s hardware exists in a solid-state physical-form, and it is, in itself and without physical intervention, unchanging. – It is not currently possible for the hardware in your computer to reconfigure itself. – The day may come, however, and it might not be that far in the future; where your computer’s hardware will be capable of reconfiguring itself, to a degree at least. At the time of writing, however, it is not possible for it to do so.

Software; the complicated bit, however, is not a solid-state, unchanging entity. – Software is a set of complex instructions, routines, and loops, arranged into sets, which instruct the hardware how to perform. Software, for the most part, exists in magnetic and/or electrostatic form on storage-media such as hard-drives, USB-drives, etc. Software is made up of ones and zeros: A yes or a no, a true or a false, a positive response or a negative response. These ones and zeros (bits) are clustered into groups of eight (8) ones and zeros known as a byte. Each byte can represent a character, an instruction, or part of an instruction. One thousand and thirty-two bytes is a kilobyte, 1032 kilobytes is a megabyte ( 1,065,024 bytes), 1032 megabytes is a gigabyte…

A bit is like a hole. If it’s an empty hole (Its natural state) then its value is zero. If it’s a hole full of water then its value is 1. Remember that digital values are read in binary; so in a byte, if that byte contains an empty hole followed by three consecutive holes full of water, followed by three empty holes, and the last hole is full of water, then that byte = 01110001 binary (BCD), which is read as 0 + 64 + 32 + 16 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 = 113 denary (Base 10, the usual numerical system we use.).

My point is: It’s only numbers: there is nothing actually physical about it. It can’t alter or destroy the atomic structure of a MOSFET (Metal Oxide Series Field Effect Transistor), which is one of perhaps millions of near-identical microscopic component parts of a chip or integrated circuit; made up of a doped semiconductor-material on a silicon substrate.

So we’ve established that a virus, just like any other software/malware, is, in itself, harmless to hardware. – So then how does it do any harm? The answer is that it detrimentally affects other software, altering its’ structure and causing it to present incorrect instructions to the hardware. It’s called a virus because, just like a physical biological virus, it infects; in this case your computer rather than your body, and it duplicates itself. It also releases a payload of “toxins” which affect certain parts of your computer’s software, causing them to instruct the hardware to carry out operations that you have no intention of the hardware carrying out. This can include opening up a port to allow other infections in, or even to allow a hacker to gain control remotely over your computer. Also the virus will usually open a port so that it can attack all your contacts by sending copies of itself to them in email or by some other means.

Sometimes the virus/malware infection may get so prolific that it has nowhere left to copy itself to, therefore it might overwrite essential software such as a driver and cause the computer to crash – as probably occurred in the case mentioned in the opening paragraphs.

- So, to conclude; if you contract an infection on your computer and you don’t remove it then there is a chance that it could overrun your other software and cause your machine to crash. You DO NOT need to replace the computer in such a case. At very worst as a shortcut you’ll maybe prefer to replace the existing, virus-ridden, hard-drive with a brand new, clean, hard-drive, and start again from scratch.

Save your money, stop wasting your time: Read Kkomp.com – Beyond instead, and get clued-up on how to make things work for you, rather than allowing things to take control of your life, thus making you the servant of machine: It really is meant to be the other way around you know.