C4) What does the virus do? If an anti-virus program has detected a virus on your computer, don't rush to post a question to this list asking what it does. First, it might be a false positive alert (especially if the virus is found only in one file), and second, some viruses are extremely common, so the question "What does the Stoned virus do?" or "What does the Jerusalem virus do?" is asked here repeatedly. While this list is monitored by several anti-virus experts, they get tired of perpetually answering the same questions over and over again. In any case, if you really need to know what a particular virus does (as opposed to knowing enough to get rid of it), you will need a longer treatise than could be given to you here. For example, the Stoned virus replaces the disk's boot record with its own, relocating the original to a sector on the disk that may (or may not) occur in an unused portion of the root directory of a DOS diskette; when active, it sits in an area a few kilobytes below the top of memory. All this description could apply to a number of common viruses; but the important points of where the original boot sector goes - and what effect that has on networking software, non-DOS partitions, and so on are all major questions in themselves. Therefore, it is better if you first try to answer your question yourself. There are several sources of information about the known computer viruses, so please consult one of them before requesting information publicly. Chances are that your virus is rather well known and that it is already described in detail in at least one of these sources. (See the answer to question A7, for instance.) .