Win Xp dlt/fornat & BIOS protection

From: Dude Harry (dude_at_funcow.net)
Date: 08/10/05 

Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2005 19:33:26 -0400

Hi. I have windows xp media edition and use Norton 2005 Antivirus and
Sygate fireall for protection. I had a program I downloaded (yes I
know you should buy your software) that was supposed to be an ISO file
utility and it tried to write to my BIOS and it crashed my computer. I
received a fatal error and windows was shutting down to protect itself
from damage. This occured 3 or 4 times until I inserted the restore
disk which corrected the problem and then I ran windows restore.

Another time about a year ago I had a program I downloaded that was
supposed to be a better defrag program which deleted all my files and
folders except the windows folder.
(Not argueing about whether downloading is safe or legit as I have
seen 2 instances where it is not.)

I am curious as to how you can protect yourself from BIOS re-writes or
delete and formats if you have an antivirus program and firewall. Why
were these not detected and stopped from operating. They were not
obvious viruses but programs someone altered to perform unwelcomed
steps that should have been stopped I would assume.

My question is if the antivirus and firewall are not desginded to
protect you from these things, how do you protect the computer other
than not downloading unknown software.
My BIOS has no built in protection that I can see in either backup or
virus prtoection.
Is there a program that can protect you from unwanted procedures such
as mentioned above.??
Any help would be appreciated.

Please reply here.
Thank you in advance.
Dave

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